Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced earlier this month that he expects robotics sales to make up a full 80% of Tesla’s value. He sees no limit to how many semi-functional Optimus robots people will buy, and he expects Tesla to largely pivot to being an AI and robotics company that does a little bit of carmaking on the side. It’s unfortunate for Musk and his view of Tesla, then, that the company’s head of Optimus AI just quit — even seemingly taking a pay cut to get out.
Ashish Kumar, former head of AI for Tesla’s Optimus project, announced his departure from Tesla on Twitter last night. His LinkedIn profile says he’s now at Meta, working as a research scientist, and he stated in a follow-up tweet that the decision to leave wasn’t influenced by money — in fact, the “financial upside at Tesla was significantly larger.” Generally, in the business world, it’s not a great sign when the most important people for your company’s most important project jump ship without a clear motivation. It points toward issues with the project, the company, or the management.
Not a great sign for Optimus
If a project lead leaves one company for another because of some offer they can’t refuse — a title bump, better pay, the chance to build their dream project — it’s always disappointing for the company they leave, but generally understandable. Kumar’s departure from Tesla doesn’t have those kinds of clear motivations, making it far more suspect. It points towards some sort of issue at Tesla that Kumar was trying to get away from — perhaps micromanagement from up top, or a concern that the Optimus project isn’t progressing as planned or could fail to meet upcoming deadlines.
Optimus is supposed to be the future of Tesla, the only possible way to justify its cult of personality meme stock valuation. Crucial leaders abandoning the project without a clearly better alternative on the horizon is a terrible sign, yet it’s a sign the market is ignoring — at time of writing, TSLA is up 1.65% today. Will retail traders ever give in and admit the company’s value is wholly unmoored from its underlying finances, or will Tesla’s valuation continue to climb as the company itself keeps rotting?
