Elon Musk has finally put a duration on a supply-chain problem he first flagged in 2025. Speaking Saturday, Oct. 10, at the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley X Takeover at Giga Texas, he said China's export curbs on magnets used in electric motors "set back the Optimus program by like two or three months," and that Tesla briefly had "robots with no arms," according to Teslarati's write-up of the stream and matching coverage from BigGo.
What he said about magnets
Musk described China preventing the export of magnets for use in electric motors, then added the two-to-three-month figure and the no-arms line. Teslarati notes he had raised the magnet issue on Tesla's April 2025 earnings call, when he tied it to permanent magnets in the arm actuators, but had not previously put a length on the delay. His fix, he said Saturday, is domestic supply: "You've got to be able to make all the parts domestically."
That is a supply-chain confession, not a new production number. Tesla still has not published any Optimus unit counts. The Information's Sept. 25 report, summarized earlier by Electrek, described a sharp August ramp without an exact weekly figure, and Tesla's Oct. 2 Q3 delivery release said nothing about robots.
Hands remain the bottleneck
Asked what gives him confidence Optimus can lead, Musk spent the time on how hard hands are. Fine motor skills are "incredibly difficult to get right. Shockingly difficult," Teslarati quotes him saying. Doing precision and force at once — for example driving a small self-tapping screw into wood — is one of the hardest problems, and durable touch sensors that elastically deform without failing after a few thousand cycles are another. BigGo's account of the same segment matches that framing.
He also dismissed most rival robot videos: "Any complicated looking robot demo, it's a canned demo. It's not real." Real capability, he said, is showing a robot something it has never seen and watching it cope, the way FSD handles a new city.
A slow S-curve, still aimed at late 2027
Musk said the early part of the Optimus production S-curve "is going to be very slow at the beginning," partly because "unlike cars, there's no pre existing supply chain for robot stuff," echoing a July post on X that production "will be extremely slow at first." He has separately talked about wanting Optimus available to the public by late 2027; Tesla has not confirmed that date in a filing.
What it means for investors: The magnet delay is now a dated, attributed admission rather than a vague risk factor, and it reinforces why Tesla is pushing domestic parts and why early Optimus builds still go to the company's own Optimus Academy. It does not change the numbers we can put in a model: output remains Not disclosed. Listen on the Oct. 21 earnings call for any exact weekly rate, any domestic magnet plan with a timeline, or a firmer external-sales date. We'll keep the Optimus Tracker updated when those land.