Tesla earnings calls are rarely completely normal.
In the past, CEO Elon Musk has gone off on tangents, insulted the analysts asking questions, and taken questions from a random Youtuber because the analyst questions were “so dry.”
Tesla just had a record-setting quarter, delivering 497,000 vehicles and reporting a 29% increase in automotive revenues.
But all is not well in Teslaville, as rising costs hurt profits and the company lowered its capex guidance for the year, despite numerous production initiatives it needs to fund.
“The efficiency of that revenue coming through tells us there is something broken down there in terms of the cost of doing business,” according to Brian Mulberry, senior client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment Management.
“A lot of investment is going into growing the Gigafactories, investments into cybertaxis, Optimus robot ramp… some capex spending is legit, and some of it represents inefficiencies.”
But while Elon Musk gets to speak his mind on everything on X, the microblogging social media site he owns, he often uses Tesla’s earnings calls to let his free-flowing imagination roam.
Tesla’s Q3 2025 earnings call was no different. Here are three of the wildest statements Elon Musk made during this week’s call with investors and analysts.
Image source: Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Elon Musk wonders whether Tesla cars dream of electric sheep
Famed science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s short story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is one of the seminal pieces of fiction writing in the 20th century, and was the inspiration for the critically acclaimed Blade Runner film from 1982 starring Harrison Ford.
The story’s central theme is whether non-sentient beings infused with artificial intelligence, like androids, have the same free will and rights as humans imbued with natural intelligence.
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Elon Musk refers to Teslas as “robots on wheels,” and he let his mind wander about whether they get “bored,” considering how “intelligent” the vehicles are.
“It might almost be too much intelligence for a car. I do wonder, like, how much intelligence should you have in a car? It might get bored,” Musk said in response to a question about expanding production capacity.
“One of the things I thought of, like, well, if we’ve got all these cars that maybe are bored, well, why they’re sort of, if they are bored, we could actually have a giant distributed inference fleet. If they’re not actively driving, just have a giant distributed inference fleet.”
Those idle vehicles would constantly learn and share information as they deduce new details on the streets Tesla robots travel. Musk sees “maybe at some point” 100 million Teslas all learning and sharing information and solving problems in the real world.
Optimus, the money-making robot, is coming soon
Part of Elon Musk’s vision is a world free from mundane tasks for the average working person, with humanoid robots tirelessly doing those tasks.
Musk sees Optimus as the key to that future, referring to the still-in-development bot as “the infinite money glitch.”
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“It’s difficult to express the magnitude of, like, if you’ve got something that, like, if Optimus, I think, probably achieves five times the productivity of a person per year because it can operate twenty-four seven. It doesn’t even need to charge. It can operate tethered,” Musk said.
“It’s plugged in the whole time. That’s why I call it, like, if you’re true to sustainable abundance, where working will be optional. There’s a limit to how much AI can do in enhancing the productivity of humans. There is not really a limit to AI that is embodied. That’s why I called [it] the infinite money glitch.”
But if Musk believes less intelligent Tesla vehicles can “get bored,” one has to wonder whether he has considered what else a humanoid robot (with potentially infinite intelligence and that is chained to an outlet so it can work nonstop) might “get.”
As actor Jared Leto recently discovered, boredom may be the least of its issues.
Elon Musk calls Glass Lewis, ISS “corporate terrorists”
Elon Musk doesn’t seem to take challenges to his authority well, so when investor advisory firms ISS and Glass Lewis recently opposed Tesla’s pay package that could potentially net Musk $1 trillion in compensation, it was only a matter of time before Musk hit back.
While Tesla has defended the pay package on social media, Musk himself hasn’t said much publicly, until now.
“I just need enough voting control to give a strong influence, but not so much that I can’t be fired if I go insane. I think that sort of number is in the mid-twenties approximately,” Musk said.
“Like I said, I just don’t feel comfortable building a robot army here and then being ousted because of some asinine recommendations from ISS and Glass Lewis who have no freaking clue. I mean, those guys are corporate terrorists,” he said.
ISS and Glass Lewis did not return a request for comment.
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