The head of the Humanoid Robot program Optimus Humanoid, Milan Kovac, leaves the company.
Kovac said on Friday to position Ax that “had to make the most difficult decision” in his life to leave. “I have been far from home for too long and I will have to spend more time with family abroad,” he wrote. Kovac said he was “the only reason” and that his support for Musk and Tesla is “Ironlad”.
Kovac’s departure was reported for the first time Friday of Bloomberg News.
Departure comes as Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk claimed The company will have “thousands” of Optimus robots operating in its factories later this year. “And we hope to climb optimus faster than any product, I think, in history, to reach millions of units a year as soon as possible,” said Musk last month.
Kovac worked in Tesla for almost 10 years, with much of this time as a maximum engineer of the Autopilot team. It was used to help the development of Optimus in 2022 and became vice president, supervising the program by the end of 2024.
“I’m driving the Optimus (Tesla Humanoid Robot) program and all its engineering teams,” Kovac wrote previously on his Linkedin profile. “Separately, I am also promoting the engineering teams responsible for all the foundations and infrastructures of common software between Optimus and Autopilot.”
Asok Elluswamy, the Vice President of the AI Software Division of Tesla, will assume the Optimus project, according to Bloomberg.
This story has been updated with Kovac’s X Post information about its departure.
