Tesla Investors Are Eager to Hear Elon Musk Talk About Everything But EVs
Tesla is scheduled to report earnings tomorrow (Jan. 28). But the electric carmaker’s shareholders are less interested in quarterly margins than in hearing Elon Musk talk about everything else. On Say.com, a third-party platform Tesla uses to collect questions for its earnings calls, the most up-voted submissions from both retail and institutional investors aren’t about vehicle sales; they’re about robotaxis, humanoid robots and SpaceX.
Here are the top investor questions, and why they matter.
“You once said: Loyalty deserves loyalty. Will long-term Tesla shareholders still be prioritized if SpaceX does an IPO?”
Musk runs six companies, but Tesla is the only one that’s publicly traded. As a result, its earnings calls have become the one venue where investors and Wall Street analysts can directly ask Musk about his other privately-held ventures. SpaceX has been top of mind for many Musk observers because of its highly anticipated blockbuster IPO. The rocket and satellite company is reportedly taking steps to go public as soon as this year, targeting a valuation of $1.5 trillion—nearly double its current valuation of $800 billion.
That would instantly make SpaceX Musk’s most valuable company. Tesla, for now, remains the largest Musk-led firm with a $1.36 trillion market cap, but its momentum is fading as EV sales slow and new products struggle to scale. Meanwhile, SpaceX is thriving out of the spotlight, pulling in 11-figure annual revenue from government contracts and consumer Starlink subscriptions. Musk’s stake there now represents more than half of his net worth.
If SpaceX goes public, Musk would suddenly have a second set of public shareholders to answer to—along with earnings calls, regulatory scrutiny and even more media obligations. Tesla investors already bristled last year when Musk took on another high-profile time sink as head of DOGE, a political side project that distracted from the carmaker.
“When is FSD going to be 100% unsupervised?” and “What is the current bottleneck to increased Robotaxi deployment & personal use of unsupervised FSD? The safety/performance of the most recent models or people to monitor robotaxis in-car or remotely? Or something else?”
When it comes to Tesla itself, investors are eager for updates on FSD and Robotaxi. FSD, short for “Full Self-Driving,” is Tesla’s driver-assistance software, though the name is misleading: it still requires a human driver to remain alert and ready to intervene at all times. Musk has been promising true autonomy for more than a decade, but it’s not quite there yet. Regulators classify FSD as Level 2 autonomy, meaning the human is still in charge. Fully unsupervised driving would be Level 5.
So far, the biggest step Tesla has taken toward that vision is Robotaxi, its autonomous ride-hailing service now operating in Austin. The company launched it in June 2025, using modified Model Y vehicles equipped with FSD. Initially, human safety monitors sat in the passenger seat. As of January, a small number of vehicles without supervisors have joined the fleet, marking a major milestone. Expansion to more cities hinges on regulatory approval.
With global EV demand leveling off, the success or failure of Robotaxi plays a large role in Tesla’s future.
“Regarding Optimus, could you share the current number of units deployed in Tesla factories and actively performing production tasks? What specific roles or operations are they handling, and how has their integration impacted factory efficiency or output?”
Another key product that will determine Tesla’s fate is Optimus, a humanoid robot designed to take over tasks that are boring or unsafe—from household chores to factory work. Naturally, Tesla’s EV factories would be a perfect proving ground for these robots. The company plans to begin training Optimus at its Austin Gigafactory in early 2026, teaching robots to perform human factory tasks.
Tesla announced the Optimus project in 2021 and unveiled a prototype in 2022. It’s powered by Tesla’s in-house machine learning and A.I. technology. Musk has described the project as one of Tesla’s most important long-term endeavors, even saying it could eventually be more significant than the company’s vehicle business.
According to Musk, initial production of Optimus is expected later this year, but at an “agonizingly slow” pace due to the complexity of humanoid robotics. Musk has targeted selling Optimus to the public as soon as next year. But given Musk’s track record of sticking to ambitious timelines, investors may want to take that with a grain of salt.