Elon Musk spends half his time talking robots and AI on Tesla earnings calls | TechCrunch

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. Elon Musk wants you to believe Tesla is no longer a car company, even if it’s still shaped like one. The company shipped nearly half a million cars last quarter and made 70% of its money from car sales. Still, Musk has spent the last few years making the case that Tesla is really an AI and robotics company, even if some of the AI happens to live in cars. And whatever the company financials suggest, Musk’s attention has been moving decisively to the AI parts of the company — projects like the Optimus robot and fully autonomous robotaxis — as the everyday concerns of a carmaker get pushed to the side. To show how that shift happened, TechCrunch teamed up with Hudson Labs, a New York-based financial research firm, to map what Musk and Tesla’s other executives have spent the last seven years talking about on the company’s quarterly earnings calls. The startup sourced transcripts of the calls from S&P Market Intelligence dating back to 2019 and used its Co-Analyst — an AI tool purpose-