Milanokobak, head of Tesla’s Optimus Humanoid Robot Program, is leaving the company.
“Kovac said in a post on X on Friday that he had to make the most difficult decisions of his life.” “I’ve been far from home for a long time, so I need to spend more time with my family abroad,” he writes. Kobak said that was “the only reason” and that his support for Musk and Tesla was “iron clad.”
Kovac’s departure was first reported Friday by Bloomberg News.
The departure comes as Tesla CEO Elon Musk claims to have “thousands” of Optimus robots operating in the factory by the end of this year. “And we expect to expand Optimus faster than any product in history to reach millions of units a year as quickly as possible,” Musk said last month.
Kovac has worked for Tesla for nearly a decade, and many of his time appeared as the top engineer on the autopilot team. He was tapped in 2022 to lead the development of Optimus and became the vice president overseeing the program in late 2024.
“I drive the Optimus program (Tesla’s humanoid robots) and all of its engineering teams,” Kovac previously wrote in his LinkedIn profile. “Separately, I also drive an engineering team responsible for all the software foundations and infrastructure that are common between Optimus and Autopilot.”
According to Bloomberg, Ashok Elluswamy, vice president of Tesla’s AI software division, will take over the Optimus project.
This story has been updated with information from Kovac’s X post about his departure.