Tesla’s Lead of Optimus AI departs and people are confused about it

Max Headroom 2025.09.20 3 min read

Tesla’s Lead of Optimus AI, Ashish Kumar, is departing the company, and people sure are confused about it.

Kumar, who has been with Tesla for just over two years, made his announcement on X, revealing he was taking a role at Meta as a Research Scientist.

He said:

“Decided to leave Tesla. 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.”

Decided to leave Tesla.

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.

— Ashish (@ashishkr9311) September 19, 2025

Tesla fans were baffled by Kumar’s decision, immediately questioning his choice, with many wondering why he’d leave Elon Musk for Mark Zuckerberg.

Some said the choice had to be financially motivated, but Kumar said it was not, and if money were the driving factor, he would have stayed at Tesla:

Financial upside at Tesla was significantly larger. Tesla is known to compensate pretty well, way before Zuck made it cool.

If I wanted to optimize for money, I would have stayed at Tesla.

— Ashish (@ashishkr9311) September 19, 2025

Others were grateful for Kumar’s contributions to the company and were very respectful regarding his decision:

All the best and thank you for your contributions to Tesla.

— Ale𝕏andra Merz (@TeslaBoomerMama) September 19, 2025

Dude, sorry for all the negative comments your getting but thank you for your contributions to Tesla and best of luck to you in your new position

— William F (@retat50) September 19, 2025

It’s possible that Kumar chose to leave Tesla for more reasons than one, and financial reasons do not appear to be the issue, as he admitted. However, it could be a better work-life balance at Meta, or perhaps there is an internal project that simply interests him more.

Tesla will be okay, and Optimus will continue to improve with a new Lead in that position. We wish Ashish the best of luck in his new role, and we are thankful for what he contributed to the Optimus program.

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