Tesla’s Top Robot Mind Defects To Zuckerberg’s Meta, Says It Wasn’t About The Paycheck

Tesla’s Optimus AI team lead Ashish Kumar has left the electric carmaker to join Meta Platforms as a research scientist, marking another high-profile talent move in Silicon Valley’s race for artificial intelligence expertise.

Kumar, who led AI development for Tesla’s humanoid robot program, announced his departure on X. “It’s been an incredible ride leading the Optimus AI team,” he wrote. “We went all-in on scalable methods — swapping the classical stack with reinforcement learning and scaling dexterity by learning from videos.” He added that “AI is the most significant bit to unlock humanoids.”

He addressed questions about the move in follow-up posts, rejecting speculation that it was for financial reasons. “Financial upside at Tesla was significantly larger. Tesla is known to compensate pretty well, way before Zuck made it cool,” he said. In response to another user who asked if Meta was paying him $1 billion, Kumar replied, “No.”

Kumar joined Tesla in July 2023. Prior to that, he spent over two years working on the Optimus project, focused on robot manipulation, dance, natural walking and robustness. 

His research interests are in reinforcement learning with a particular focus on legged locomotion. He has made contributions published in top-tier conferences, including the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, the Conference on Robot Learning, and Robotics: Science and Systems.

The move comes as Meta accelerates its AI push. The company has recently formed a new Superintelligence Labs unit under Alexander Wang, who was hired after Meta acquired a majority stake in Scale AI. 

Meta has also been poaching researchers from Apple, OpenAI and Google as CEO Mark Zuckerberg places AI at the top of the company’s agenda, investing heavily in talent and infrastructure aimed at advancing artificial general intelligence.

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment for Tesla was ‘extremely bullish’ amid ‘high’ message volume.

Tesla’s stock has risen 3.2% so far in 2025.

For updates and corrections, email newsroom[at]stocktwits[dot]com.