Musk to Tesla Employees: Hold Your Stock, Robots Are Coming

​Elon Musk has a new pitch for his Tesla employees: hang onto your shares, because the future is about to get a whole lot more robotic. In a livestreamed address on X, Musk laid out bold ambitions for Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot project—which he claims will become the biggest product ever made.

Despite a rough year for Tesla’s stock (down 42% year-to-date), Musk is urging employees to look beyond the headlines and stay the course.

Stock Price Woes and Political Turmoil
Tesla’s struggles have been tied to falling global sales, growing competition from China’s BYD, and Musk’s increasing involvement in U.S. politics. The company’s stock has become a lightning rod, with Democrats mocking its decline and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urging investors to buy in.

Musk brushed off the volatility, referencing Warren Buffett’s classic analogy of stock prices as daily shouts about your house’s value—some rational, some not.

“Sometimes they take their meds, and sometimes they don’t,” he quipped.

Robots, Self-Driving, and a Vision of Abundance
While Tesla’s EV sales have softened, Musk is betting the company’s future on two things: Full Self-Driving (FSD) and Optimus humanoid robots.

He claimed the Model Y would remain the best-selling vehicle globally, and said FSD technology is advancing to the point where Tesla vehicles can now drive themselves off the factory line.

Though the software still requires human intervention every 13 miles in testing, Musk insists it will soon be 10 times safer than a human driver.

As for Optimus, Musk envisions 5,000 robots built this year and a massive scale-up to 50,000 in 2026, calling it a "personal robot buddy" capable of everything from cleaning and dog-walking to childcare and teaching.

Tesla’s Big Bet on the Future
Musk predicted that Optimus will become the biggest-selling product in history, outpacing anything humanity has ever built—“10 times bigger than the next biggest product,” he said.

He added that employees will get first dibs on buying the robots next year, framing the effort as part of a broader mission toward “sustainable abundance”—a world where goods and services are available on demand thanks to robot labor and solar power.

Whether or not Tesla can deliver on that vision remains to be seen. But for now, Musk is asking his team to look past the noise, ignore the falling share price, and believe in the long game.



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