The pinnacle of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robotic program, Milan Kovac, is leaving the corporate.
Kovac stated Friday in a publish on X that he “needed to take advantage of tough determination” of his life to go away. “I’ve been far-off from house for too lengthy, and might want to spend extra time with household overseas,” he wrote. Kovac stated that was “the one purpose” 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 may have “1000’s” of Optimus robots working in its factories by the top of this 12 months. “And we count on to scale Optimus up quicker than any product, I feel, in historical past, to get to tens of millions of items per 12 months as quickly as attainable,” Musk stated final month.
Kovac labored at Tesla for practically 10 years, with a lot of that point coming as a prime engineer on the Autopilot staff. 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 chargeable for all of the software program foundations & infrastructure frequent between Optimus and Autopilot.”
Ashok Elluswamy, the vice chairman of Tesla’s AI software program division, will take over the Optimus undertaking, in response to Bloomberg.
This story has been up to date with data from Kovac’s X publish about his departure.
