Tesla CEO Elon Musk surprised attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday (January 22) by announcing plans to sell the company’s humanoid Optimus robots to the public by the end of 2027.
During a conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Musk revealed that Tesla is already using Optimus robots for simple factory tasks, with plans for them to handle more complex operations by the end of this year.
“By the end of next year, I think we’d be selling humanoid robots to the public,” Musk said at the forum. “That’s when we are confident it’ll have very high reliability — you can basically ask it to do anything you like,” he explained during his appearance.
The timeline provides more concrete details about Tesla’s robotics ambitions, which Musk has positioned as a key focus for the company alongside artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles. This development comes as Tesla’s core automotive business has faced challenges, with two consecutive years of declining vehicle deliveries due to an aging product lineup and the loss of EV incentives in the United States.
Musk had previously indicated during a January 2025 earnings call that his “very rough guess” was that Tesla would begin delivering Optimus robots to other companies in the second half of 2026, but the Davos announcement offers a clearer consumer timeline.
The Tesla CEO made bold predictions about the future of robotics, suggesting that eventually robots will outnumber people. “My prediction is, in the benign scenario of the future, that we will actually make so many robots and AI that they will actually saturate all human needs,” Musk said. “There will be such an abundance of goods and services… My prediction is there will be more robots than people.”
Musk also warned that the initial production of both Optimus robots and Tesla’s newest vehicle, the Cybercab, will be “agonizingly slow,” according to a post he shared on his social media platform X.
The CEO’s appearance at Davos came as a surprise to many, as he had previously criticized the World Economic Forum, once calling the annual gathering “boring” and describing the WEF as “increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want.”
During his wide-ranging conversation with Fink, Musk also discussed data centers in space, robotaxis, and power generation challenges. He mentioned that Tesla and SpaceX teams are separately working to build 100 gigawatts of manufactured solar power capacity annually in the United States within about three years.
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