The pinnacle of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robotic program, Milan Kovac, is leaving the corporate.
Kovac mentioned Friday in a publish on X that he “needed to take advantage of tough determination” of his life to depart. “I’ve been distant from dwelling 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 help 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 may have “hundreds” of Optimus robots working in its factories by the top of this 12 months. “And we count on to scale Optimus up sooner than any product, I feel, in historical past, to get to tens of millions of items per 12 months 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 growth 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 answerable 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 line with Bloomberg.
This story has been up to date with data from Kovac’s X publish about his departure.
