On June 6, 2025, Milan Kovac, the VP running Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program, announced he was leaving the company. Bloomberg reported the news first; within hours Kovac confirmed it himself on X, calling it “the most difficult decision” of his life — in the same week Musk was busy breaking with the White House.
Leadership churn alone rarely makes history, but the timing is worth recording: Kovac’s exit landed at the exact moment Musk was making his most aggressive production promises for Optimus — with only six months left until the “thousands of robots by year end” deadline, the program changed hands. For teams watching robotics and embodied AI, it was June 2025’s public lesson in the gap between scaling commitments and leadership stability.
Who Kovac Is, and Why He Left
Kovac spent nearly ten years at Tesla, most of that time as a senior Autopilot engineer. He joined the Optimus effort in 2022 and was promoted to VP in late 2024, becoming the program’s de facto leader — and, increasingly, its only public face.
In his June 6 post on X, he explained the decision in personal terms: he had spent too long away from family living abroad, and that was the only reason. He called it the hardest decision of his life and added that his support for Musk and Tesla was “ironclad.” Bloomberg broke the news that day, and TechCrunch followed with a rundown of his tenure and role change.
Read together, the two accounts agree on the facts and stay quiet on everything else — which is exactly why the surrounding week matters when interpreting the move.
Nothing in the post pointed to disagreements over direction, and nothing linked the exit to Musk’s White House feud — but the timing invites the connection. The day before, Tesla stock had logged its worst one-day drop on record amid the fallout, and Musk had spent the entire week consumed by the break with the president.
The Successor and Optimus Today
Taking over is Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI software — a core figure in the Autopilot and FSD software lineage. In effect, Optimus returns to direct management by Tesla’s most mature AI software organization, with the person behind its self-driving stack now running the humanoid program.
The program’s public commitments remain aggressive. Musk had claimed Tesla would have “thousands” of Optimus robots operating in its factories by the end of 2025, and said the company expects “to scale Optimus up faster than any product” in history, toward a target of millions of units per year. The distance between a departing program chief and those numbers is precisely what markets, suppliers, and the talent pool will keep watching.
The succession choice is itself a signal. Pulling the new lead from the Autopilot organization says Tesla treats robots and self-driving as one technology stack with two applications, not two separate product lines.
What It Means for the Humanoid Race
For practitioners, the departure carries three lessons. First, the bigger the production promise, the higher the personal profile and exit cost of the leader attached to it — Kovac went from Autopilot engineer to the public face of an entire program in barely half a year. Long-cycle hardware programs are most vulnerable when key people leave at the peak of the hype.
Second, humanoid programs live or die on software and integration: motion control, perception, teleoperation, and factory deployment are all software problems. Handing the program to an AI software VP is Tesla’s own acknowledgment of that priority — and a sign Optimus will hew closer to the FSD technology stack going forward.
Third, for the broader humanoid ecosystem, competition by mid-2025 had entered a promise-management phase: the teams that can hold together leadership, production timelines, and external expectations at the same time are the ones that win the next round of talent and capital. Rivals reading the news should not over-index on one departure — programs rarely pivot on a single resignation — but they should note how little Tesla adjusted its story. On the day Optimus changed hands, Musk did not revise his public timeline, and that gap between commitment and continuity is the most useful indicator to watch.
Sources
- Tesla’s Optimus robot VP is leaving the company — TechCrunch
- Milan Kovac departure announcement — X
- The 10 days that unravelled their relationship — BBC
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.