Tesla’s Optimus robot VP is leaving the company

The top of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robotic program, Milan Kovac, is leaving the corporate.

Kovac stated Friday in a post on X that he “needed to take advantage of tough choice” of his life to depart. “I’ve been distant from residence for too lengthy, and might want to spend extra time with household overseas,” he wrote. Kovac stated that was “the one cause” and that his help for Musk and Tesla is “ironclad.”

Kovac’s departure was first reported Friday by Bloomberg News.

The departure comes as Tesla CEO Elon Musk has claimed the corporate could have “1000’s” of Optimus robots working in its factories by the tip of this yr. “And we count on to scale Optimus up quicker than any product, I believe, in historical past, to get to hundreds of thousands of items per yr as quickly as potential,” Musk stated final month.

Kovac labored at Tesla for almost 10 years, with a lot of that point coming as a high engineer on the Autopilot group. He was tapped to assist lead growth of Optimus in 2022 and have become a vp overseeing this system in late 2024.

“I’m driving the Optimus program (Tesla’s humanoid robotic) & all its engineering groups,” Kovac beforehand wrote on his LinkedIn profile. “Individually, I’m additionally driving the engineering groups chargeable for all of the software program foundations & infrastructure widespread between Optimus and Autopilot.”

Ashok Elluswamy, the vp of Tesla’s AI software program division, will take over the Optimus challenge, in line with Bloomberg.

This story has been up to date with info from Kovac’s X submit about his departure.