There is a simple way to tell what a CEO really cares about. Count the words they spend on every topic.
TechCrunch and Hudson Labs, a New York financial research firm, did exactly that with Tesla. They examined seven years of earnings calls using S&P Market Intelligence transcripts that go back to 2019.
Hudson Labs' Co-Analyst AI tool sorted each sentence by topic. It counts how often each subject comes up, so the findings come from numbers, not impressions.
Cars and manufacturing now take up under one-third of his call time.
Tesla is still a car company by the numbers.
Musk has spent years arguing that this is the wrong way to see the company.
He frames the automaker as an artificial-intelligence and robotics company first, and says self-driving technology is the main reason for Tesla's high valuation. The Optimus robot is the clearest example of where his focus has gone.
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Tesla unveiled the humanoid project in 2021. At the time, it barely registered in the conversation.
Musk's turn toward robots and AI happened as the core auto business stopped growing. In 2024, competition from legacy automakers and Chinese newcomers hurt the car business.
Musk made his view clear on the Q1 2024 call.
"If you value Tesla as just an auto company, fundamentally, it's the wrong framework," he said. "If somebody doesn't believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company."
The people around him moved more slowly, but their focus has shifted too. CFO Vaibhav Taneja and engineering VP Lars Moravy once spent nearly 50% or more of their call time on building and selling cars.
That changed in 2024. These days, the auto business takes up around 30% of their time, with AI, robotaxi, and Full Self-Driving the next most frequent topics.
When they do talk about the future, they use language as big as Musk's. "The path to amazing abundance is ever challenging and requires making bold bets," Taneja said on the Q2 2026 call.
"Our progress will be nonlinear. The future is going to be great."
The gap between what the CEO talks about and where the money comes from matters when you own the stock. Tesla's AI and robotics efforts do not yet generate real returns, while the car business still supplies most of the revenue.
For investors, the question is which side of that gap is the real story. Musk has already made his answer clear.
The quarterly reports show a company that still sells cars. The earnings calls describe something else entirely.
Both versions of Tesla can be true at the same time. Cars fund the company today, while the robots may define it tomorrow.
The car business paid for Tesla's present, and Musk is clearly betting on its future. If you own the stock, you are buying that bet right along with him.
Until those projects start earning their keep, the cars are the ones doing the work. The next few earnings reports will show whether the robot talk starts showing up in the profit numbers.
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