One of the key figures in the development of Tesla's artificial intelligence program has left the company to pursue new opportunities at Meta.
What's happening?
Ashish Kumar, who has led Tesla's Optimus AI team since July 2023, publicly announced his departure from the company in a Sept. 19 social media post.
"Decided to leave Tesla," Kumar began.
"It's been an incredible ride leading the Optimus AI team. We went all-in on scalable methods — swapping the classical stack with reinforcement learning & scaling dexterity by learning from videos. AI is the most significant bit to unlock humanoids."
Kumar has opted to join Meta as a research scientist. While Kumar chose not to disclose the exact reasons behind his departure, he made it clear that the move was not motivated by money.
"Financial upside at Tesla was significantly larger. Tesla is known to compensate pretty well, way before Zuck made it cool," Kumar said, referring to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "If I wanted to optimize for money, I would have stayed at Tesla."
Why is Kumar's departure important?
Irrespective of the reason behind Kumar's sudden exit, the move may prove to be a difficult obstacle for the company to overcome in the short term.
As the lead for the Optimus program, Kumar was placed in charge of a project to which Tesla was fully committed. In fact, according to Tesla's announcement of its highly awaited Master Plan Part 4, Optimus may soon become the company's top priority.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has long promoted the concept of a robot-driven future, where humanoid machines will handle monotonous or hazardous tasks to enhance the quality of life for all humankind.
According to Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, Tesla's true value is based on more than its ability to manufacture electric vehicles.
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Definitely 👍 "Tesla has never been valued strictly as a car company and instead as a bet on Musk's ability to bring a sci-fi future to life," Sosnick said, per Bloomberg.
What's being done about Kumar's exit from Tesla?
Tesla may do just fine without Kumar behind the Optimus program.
However, his departure could be viewed as another setback for a company that has seen its fair share of struggles throughout 2025. Tesla reported a significant decline in car sales in several key automotive markets worldwide.
While it remains to be seen how the company will handle the personnel shake-up, a number of users on Reddit's r/RealTesla couldn't help but speculate about what the news means for Tesla as a whole.
"So as money is not the reason for leaving it seems either the hopelessness of the project, the company as such or even Elon is his reason for leaving," one commenter wrote.
"Nothing says 'world-changing, infinite wealth producing, most successful consumer product in the whole history of civilization' like the resignation of the man who knows the product best," another user quipped.
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