Tesla has misplaced one other chief of its Optimus humanoid robotic program, which is upsetting those that wager on Tesla’s inventory (TSLA), as CEO Elon Musk says most of Tesla’s worth is tied to the robotic.
Musk claims that 80% of Tesla’s future earnings would come from its humanoid robotic, which he believes would herald trillions of {dollars} and eventually justify Tesla buying and selling at greater than 200 instances earnings.
That’s been laborious to consider contemplating the state of the Optimus program.
All of Tesla’s public demonstrations to date have concerned distant management by people, and the corporate has not been totally forthcoming about that.
In June, Milan Kovac, the top of the Optimus program, left Tesla, simply months after being promoted to senior vice-president by Musk.
Shortly after, we discovered that Tesla was delaying manufacturing attributable to an sudden redesign.
Now, we study that one other chief of the Optimus program has left Tesla: Ashish Kumar, who led Tesla’s Optimus AI crew for the previous two years.
Kumar obtained a phD in synthetic intelligence from Berkeley in 2023 and shortly joined Tesla’s humanoid effort. He was believed to be main the AI side of this system, whereas Kovac led the general program, together with robotics.
He introduced his departure on X:
Kumar confirmed that he joined Meta’s AI crew as a researcher. Meta has been aggressively poaching AI researchers during the last 12 months, however Tesla has remained largely unaffected by this effort.
The Fb proprietor has been reported to offer substantial compensation packages value a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars} and even billions to AI researchers, however this hasn’t been confirmed.
Some Tesla shareholders have been visibly upset by Kumar’s announcement and a few shortly accused him of taking Meta’s cash:
Kumar responded and claimed that Tesla was really giving him a greater deal than Meta:
Monetary upside at Tesla was considerably bigger. Tesla is thought to compensate fairly nicely, approach earlier than Zuck made it cool. If I needed to optimize for cash, I might have stayed at Tesla.
It didn’t cease many Tesla sharehodlers to be imply to him for merely deciding to work on one thing else than Optimus:
Electrek’s Take
It is not going to come as a shock to anybody right here, however rattling, the Tesla group is basically changing into poisonous.
This particular person devoted two years of his life working at Tesla. The one acceptable factor to say is: thanks in your laborious work and good luck in your subsequent endeavor.
The explanation they’re being so imply is that they consider Elon Musk’s lies that Optimus will justify Tesla’s insane valuation and turn into probably the most useful firm on the earth; this man’s departure challenges their view.
Why would he quit engaged on an important product of all time and sure turn into a billionaire within the course of? Perhaps as a result of this stuff received’t occur?
