Elon Musk responded in kind to Tesla Inc. investors reapproving his massive compensation plan, offering outlandish predictions that he can enrich shareholders all over again.
After Tesla’s general counsel confirmed Thursday that investors supported awarding stock options to Musk worth as much as $55.8 billion, the chief executive officer said the company’s robot-making effort may one day dwarf its car business.
Tesla has all of two humanoid robot prototypes plucking battery cells off the end of a production line in California and placing them in shipping containers. “Quite a few” others are cruising around the company’s offices in Palo Alto, Musk said during the company’s annual meeting.
The CEO isn’t expecting the bot — called Optimus — to go into limited production until next year, when Tesla could put a few thousand to the test in its own factories. He nevertheless offered a pie-in-the-sky projection that Tesla may one day 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 would mean a $20 trillion market cap from Optimus alone,” Musk said. “It’s within the realm of possibility for Tesla to achieve a valuation 10-times that of the most valuable company today.”