Elon Musk Touts 'Optimus Academy' To Train Robots — Says SpaceX, Tesla Have '100 GW A Year' Mandate On Solar Energy Generation

Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has touted an "Optimus Academy" to train the automaker's Optimus humanoid robots. Optimus Academy In a new interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, alongside Stripe co-founder John Collison on Thursday, Musk shared his plans of building an "Optimus academy." He shared that Tesla would need to build a lot of robots and put them in the academy to help the robots do "self-play in reality," adding that Tesla was building it out to have "at least 10,000 Optimus robots, maybe 20-30,000 [robots] that are doing self-play and testing different tasks." Musk also hailed Tesla's reality generator, which he said would help in training the robots. He also shared that Tesla would employ "millions of simulated robots in a simulated world" and then close the "simulations to reality gap" by using the real-world robots. The billionaire had earlier shared that the Optimus robot would be able to build civilizations on different planets, touting the robot as the first-ever von Neumann machine/probe, which is a theoretical machine capable of creating replicas of itself by using the raw materials it extracts from a planet. SpaceX, Tesla's Solar Mandate Musk has been a vocal proponent of solar energy, touting it as the ideal energy source for the Earth on multiple occasions. He has also shared that solar energy would help humanity put orbital datacenters for space-based compute. During his appearance on the podcast, Musk reiterated his bullish stance on solar energy. "We're going as fast as possible in scaling domestic production [of solar cells]," Musk said when asked about his solar goals. He then shared that "both Tesla and SpaceX have a mandate to get to 100 GW a year of solar," Musk said. Please enjoy this Cheeky Pint / @dwarkesh_sp crossover with @elonmusk.Dwarkesh was most interested in how Elon is going to make space datacenters work. I was most interested in Elon's method for attacking hard technical problems, and why it hasn't been replicated as much as you… pic.twitter.com/28Lw9rAqlN— John Collison (@collision) February 5, 2026 Benzinga Edge Rankings show that Tesla scores well on the Momentum metric and offers a favorable price trend in the Long Term. Price Action: TSLA slid 2.17% to $397.21 at market close on Thursday, sliding 2.09% further to $388.90 during the after-hours session. Check out more of Benzinga's Future Of Mobility coverage by following this link. Photo courtesy: Shutterstock