Tesla’s Optimus robotic VP is leaving the corporate

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

Kovac mentioned Friday in a put up on X that he “needed to take advantage of troublesome determination” 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 mentioned that was “the one motive” and that his assist for Musk and Tesla is “ironclad.”

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

The departure comes as Tesla CEO Elon Musk has claimed the corporate can have “1000’s” of Optimus robots working in its factories by the tip of this yr. “And we anticipate to scale Optimus up quicker than any product, I feel, in historical past, to get to thousands and thousands of models per yr as quickly as attainable,” Musk mentioned final month.

Kovac labored at Tesla for almost 10 years, with a lot of that point coming as a high engineer on the Autopilot crew. He was tapped to assist lead improvement of Optimus in 2022 and have become a vice chairman 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 liable for all of the software program foundations & infrastructure widespread between Optimus and Autopilot.”

Ashok Elluswamy, the vice chairman of Tesla’s AI software program division, will take over the Optimus undertaking, in keeping with Bloomberg.

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