Optimus unites all the attributes Elon Musk loves in a killer product—one identical set of hardware that can be affordably produced at scale, yet capable of meeting various needs through intelligent software features. Now Tesla’s vaunted robot project, tipped to add $25 trillion in value to the company, lost the director who has run the program since its inception three years ago.
The brains behind CEO Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar dream of a robot future are gone, and the repercussions are only starting to be felt as staff members say their goodbyes.
On Friday, Milan Kovac announced he would leave Tesla after more than nine years to spend more time with his family abroad. A naturalized European immigrant, he originally came to the U.S. on the same H-1B visa that Musk argues is vital for America’s competitiveness.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of his departure for Tesla since Musk himself has predicted Kovac’s humanoid robot Optimus ought to add $25 trillion to its market cap—more than all ten of the world’s most valuable companies combined. Investors have been eager for every update Musk posts on social media showing its progress, such as last month’s video of the droid nimbly dancing on two metallic feet.
🕺 pic.twitter.com/NzqAmN3F5z
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2025
“Milan, thank you for your outstanding contribution to Tesla over the past decade. It was an honor working with you,” the entrepreneur acknowledged on Friday.
Optimus incorporates all the traits Musk wants
In charge of the Optimus robot program since the start of 2022 and promoted in September to vice president, Kovac was not one of the more publicly visible Tesla executives. Nor is it all that unusual for key personnel to succumb to the brutal grind that comes with working for such a demanding CEO as Musk.
Serving as head of the program since its inception, Kovac’s leaving represents a loss perhaps best akin to the departure of Tesla’s former director of artificial intelligence, Andrej Karpathy, three years ago.
“This one hits different. You’re in the Tesla hall of fame, brother,” wrote Ryan Donnelly, Tesla’s director of North America recruiting. “Thanks for challenging and inspiring us, and for being the glue that held things together.”
Named after the Autobot leader from Hasbro’s popular Transformer franchise, Optimus isn’t just a potential revenue stream: it is the future of Tesla.
From the beginning, Musk predicted the robot would become more important to the company than its EV business.
It unites all the attributes of a killer product that Musk loves—one standardized piece of hardware that can be affordably produced at scale, but still meets various market needs, thanks to ever-improving software updates.
“This is going to be bigger than the car,” he said in April 2022, a claim that sounded even more ambitious back then when there seemed to be no limit to Tesla’s EV sales.
Designing for a utopian society built on sustainable abundance
Kovac may not have had the public profile of a Karpathy, or chief vehicle engineer Lars Moravy, but his role was core to Tesla’s equity story.
Musk predicted the droids Kovac was creating would revolutionize human behavior, and in his vision, everyone across the globe would own at least one robot, eliminating any ceiling on economic growth.
He called this an era of “sustainable abundance”, the world’s first utopian society where there is no more scarcity.
2023 has been awesome for Optimus.We’ve moved from an exploratory prototype (Bumblebee/cee) to a more stable, Tesla-designed platform (Optimus Gen-1).We’ve improved our locomotion stack, frequently walking off-gantry without falls and with a faster, increasingly more… pic.twitter.com/yCnD0SThBd
— Milan Kovac (@_milankovac_) December 31, 2023
But Musk recently opened up about the challenges Tesla faces working with an entirely new supply chain and technology, recounting how they “tried desperately” to outfit Optimus with existing, off-the-shelf actuators and sensors before deciding to design them all from scratch.
“We are designing the train and the station in real time, while also building the tracks,” he said during the Q4 earnings call in January.
Optimus has also suffered its fair share of negative publicity, affecting robotics companies grappling with high expectations.
‘Tesla will win, I guarantee you that’
Musk earned criticism in January 2024 for posting a video of Optimus folding laundry that initially failed to mention the robot was not acting of its own accord.
This then repeated itself at October’s CyberCab reveal event, dubbed “We, Robot”, where untethered versions of the two-legged droid interacted with guests, leading them to believe they were intelligent rather than remotely operated by humans.
In April, the CEO revealed that his robot ambitions had also fallen victim to the shortages in rare earth magnets caused by leading refiner China.
Yet these setbacks haven’t tempered Musk’s enthusiasm. He has predicted Tesla would go from building at least 5,000 this year—equivalent in size to a Roman legion as he put it—before increasing that two hundred-fold as early as 2029.
“We expect to scale up Optimus faster than any product, I think, in history, to get to millions of units per year as soon as possible,” he said during the Q1 earnings call.
In his goodbye on Friday, Kovac struck a humble tone.
The accomplishments achieved were his team’s rather than his own, he argued. As such, the Optimus project was not in any way in danger.
“My departure now will not change a thing,” he said, going on to end with the prediction that “Tesla will win, I guarantee you that.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
