Elon Musk responded in kind to Tesla Inc. investors reapproving his massive compensation plan, offering outlandish predictions that he can enrich shareholders all once more.
After Tesla’s general counsel confirmed Thursday that investors supported awarding stock options to Musk value as much as $55.8 billion, the chief executive officer said the corporate’s robot-making effort may in the future dwarf its automotive business.
Tesla has all of two humanoid robot prototypes plucking battery cells off the tip of a production line in California and placing them in shipping containers. “Quite just a few” others are cruising around the corporate’s offices in Palo Alto, Musk said throughout the company’s annual meeting.
The CEO isn’t expecting the bot — called Optimus — to enter limited production until next yr, when Tesla could put just a few thousand to the test in its own factories. He nevertheless offered a pie-in-the-sky projection that Tesla may in the future make around $1 trillion of profit annually from the product, without offering a time-frame.
“If the price-to-earnings multiple is, say, I don’t know, 20 or 25, something like that, that may mean a $20 trillion market cap from Optimus alone,” Musk said. “It’s throughout the realm of possibility for Tesla to attain a valuation 10-times that of the most dear company today.”
Work on robots was at the middle of an ultimatum Musk laid down earlier this yr. The CEO openly pressured Tesla’s board to spice up his stake in the corporate to around 25%, saying that he otherwise preferred to construct artificial intelligence and robotics products elsewhere.
Musk has a protracted track record of setting stretch goals, and a spotty history of achieving them on time — if in any respect. While he was proven correct, for instance, when he said in 2019 that the pursuit of self-driving technology could in the future make Tesla a half-trillion-dollar company, his repeated predictions that Tesla is on the verge of turning its customers’ cars into robotaxis haven’t panned out.
This also isn’t the primary business inside Tesla that Musk has predicted will in the future rival carmaking. The corporate continues to generate only a fraction of sales with its energy generation and storage products, years after the CEO said it may very well be roughly the identical size as Tesla’s automotive operations.
Speaking of the auto business, Musk was rather more measured.
“It’s tough sledding on the market,” he said, noting that General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and other manufacturers have dialed back plans for electric vehicle production. “Now Tesla, we’re gonna increase, nevertheless it just isn’t a simple market.”
This Article First Appeared At www.autoblog.com
