Tesla AI boss tells staff 2026 will be the 'hardest year' of their lives in all-hands meeting (www.businessinsider.com)

Tesla AI VP Ashok Elluswamy told Autopilot and Optimus staff in an all-hands that 2026 will be the “hardest year” of their lives, signaling an intensified push to meet aggressive timelines for Robotaxi rollouts and Optimus humanoid-robot production. Insiders described the meeting as a rallying cry: Tesla aims to operate Robotaxis in 8–10 metro areas and have 1,000+ ride-hailing vehicles by end of 2025, while Elon Musk has pushed Optimus production toward late 2026. Those targets flow into Musk’s unprecedented pay package tied to moonshot milestones — including deploying 1 million Robotaxis and 1 million humanoid robots — putting enormous pressure on delivery. For the AI/ML community this is significant because it crystallizes Tesla’s prioritization of rapid scaling, camera-centric perception (the Optimus team has shifted to a camera-focused approach like FSD), and intense hardware–software integration under tight schedules. Technical implications include major production and systems-engineering bottlenecks (Musk warned mass ramping will be gated by the slowest of many components), heightened operational risk as teams accelerate testing and deployment, and likely shifts in research priorities toward reliability-at-scale, model/data pipeline throughput, and real-world validation. The message also flags potential workforce strain and trade-offs between speed and safety as Tesla chases ambitious, compensation-linked milestones.