It’s Happening: Optimus 3 Changes Everything

**Dave** (0:02)
Tesla could be close to revealing Gen 3 of their Optimus Humanoid Robot very soon. The prototypes that we've seen so far are not the design intended for mass production. Elon has confirmed that they have not shown that to us yet. He's calling the new V3 Optimus sublime. Here's what we do know, along with some of the latest rumors, you can expect a sleeker design that's more capable. It's gonna run Grok AI for voice and conversation. It might be able to handle thousands of useful tasks at launch, and it could even go into mass production as soon as next year, at least according to Elon. What we don't know is how much it can actually do without human help, how much it's going to cost, and if 2026 is at all realistic, or if that's just another Elon timeline fantasy with reality coming years later. Elon does seem to be fully back into work mode at Tesla, and he's way more into robots than cars at this point, even though Tesla just announced that they delivered more EVs last quarter than it has at any prior quarter ever. Elon says that Optimus will be more valuable than everything else Tesla does combined. Wall Street seems to like that story. Tesla stock has nearly doubled in the past six months. And today on Dumb Money, we're going to tell you how we're playing Tesla and how Optimus Gen 3 could change everything.

**Chris** (1:18)
This is Dumb Money Live.

**Dave** (1:23)
Hey there, Dave here along with Chris and Jordan. We are Dumb Money. Welcome to Dumb Money Live. Quick reminder, if you don't mind, smash the like button for the Almighty Algorithm. It really does help other people find the show. Chris, Jordan, again, Tesla is my largest holding now that the stock has helped so much. And Chris, I know you've been holding off on going all in on Tesla with your leveraged play. You keep saying it's close. You've been waiting for Optimus to come closer to reality. So inquiring minds want to know this morning is now that moment for you.

**Chris** (1:55)
Well, you know, Optimus did come to reality, Optimus 2, and it sucked, but that aside, that's in the past, right? And that's been probably the, I guess, disappointing story of 2025

**Dave** (2:12)
But Optimus 2 was, it's a prototype. It's not, and Optimus 2.5, which we've also seen, is a prototype. So we don't know yet what Optimus 3 is going to be.

**Chris** (2:23)
Cool, correct. And that's what the story line is all about, right? You know, Tesla had massive first mover advantage here. This is what we've been talking about for two and a half years as it relates to generalized robotics and humanoids specifically. And we had a pretty big thesis we put out a couple years ago that this could easily be a $10 trillion sector of Tesla if the company simply executes. Over the course of that period, Elon got aggressively involved in politics. As we all know, he got spread really thin. He was massively distracted over the past year. And I think the one division that paid the price for that, more than anything else, was Optimus, which of course we now know, as we said two years ago, is the only division that really, really matters long term. And Elon has come out himself and said it's what, 80% of the value of Tesla will be Optimus. So, very disappointed in the progress of Optimus 2 We were aware of some of the issues they've been having all year, the approach, the aggressiveness into SIM training alone, that very few of us that are deep into the sector thought would work out for them and it hasn't. So, now Elon's back. Now, Elon seems to not be distracted. Elon has essentially publicly come out and stated that the entire future of Tesla is pinned on the success of Optimus.
We now know that going forward, auto sales are going to be a headwind for Tesla, especially in the United States, due to the headwinds of not having a tax rebate, right? They lost that $7,500 tax rebate. So they had a huge quarter in orders, as we all expected. Maybe a little bit...

**Jordan** (4:21)
But a lot of that was because of the expiring of that EV tax credit. So...

**Chris** (4:26)
You're exactly correct. Now, they did finally start to see a bit of a turnaround in Europe, where the tax credit is not applicable. So that's a slight positive. But I think Elon knows he can no longer count on auto. And auto is more likely than not to be a negative storyline for the company going forward. Even RoboTaxi. I think we're seeing that, but getting to that last mile here on RoboTaxi might be six months, might be two years and six months. Still nobody knows. As investors, we really can't count on it. But everything is oriented towards Optimus. From this point forward, everything is oriented towards Optimus. We know it. Elon knows it. The market now knows it. He's in a corner. Elon is in a corner. And the one piece of intel that I do have is that Elon has gone all in internally. He is spearheading the project himself now. It's probably part of the reason why we saw three of the most senior leaders on the Optimus team, the head of Optimus AI, the head of hardware and the head of their hand division, all leave the company over the past few months because they probably were not game to sleep on the floor, you know, from now until whenever.