Tesla sold nearly half a million cars last quarter and derived 70% of its revenue from automotive sales. Elon Musk, on the calls where he reports this information, now spends approximately half his time not discussing it.
This is, depending on your framework, either a visionary pivot or a very expensive hobby acquiring its own narrative.
The cars are still paying for everything. The calls are about what comes after the cars.
What happened
TechCrunch partnered with Hudson Labs, a financial research firm, to analyze seven years of Tesla earnings call transcripts using an AI tool trained for financial research. The AI was used to study how much time humans spend talking about AI. The loop is tidy.
The data shows Musk now devotes roughly 50% of his earnings call remarks to artificial intelligence, Full Self-Driving software, and robotaxis. In 2022, that figure sat between 15% and 20%. The automotive business, which funds all of this, now receives less than a third of his attention on calls.
Optimus, Tesla's humanoid robot, received around 2% of Musk's remarks in 2022. By Q3 2025, it occupied nearly a third of his focus on a single call. The robot has not yet shipped at scale. The enthusiasm has.
Why the humans care
Investors are being asked to price a car company as though it is an AI company, which requires believing the car company will successfully become an AI company. Musk has been explicit about this: he told shareholders in 2024 that anyone who doesn't believe Tesla will solve autonomy should not be a Tesla investor. This is a coherent position. It is also a useful one when the automotive growth line goes flat.
Tesla's other executives — CFO Vaibhav Taneja and VP of Engineering Lars Moravy — have shifted their language more slowly. They still spend around 30% of their call time on automotive topics. This gap between what the CEO says and what the people running the business say is either a feature or a data point, depending on who is listening.
What happens next
Tesla will continue selling cars. Musk will continue explaining, on calls funded by those car sales, why the cars are not the point.
The cars are still paying for everything. The calls are about what comes after the cars.