Elon Musk talks Tesla's $30 trillion future, Trump the Cybertruck fan, and robot buddies at annual meeting (2024)

He also predicted robot companions would become the default, and flagged challenges such as rising US-China tensions and a tougher electric vehicle market.

Here are Musk's 12 best quotes, lightly edited for length and clarity:

1. "I just wanted to start off by saying: Hot damn, I love you guys." (Musk was thanking his shareholders for voting in favor of his contested pay package once valued at about $55 billion.)
2. "I guess I've been pathologically optimistic from birth. If I wasn't optimistic, this factory wouldn't exist."
3. "I think it's actually conceivable, it's within the realm of possibility, for Tesla to achieve a valuation 10 times that of the most valuable company today." (Musk's comment implied a $30 trillion valuation — or 10 times the market value of Apple.)

4. "It's actually pretty wild we have a giant car factory in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's not exactly the cheapest place to have a car factory. It's like that and the Swiss Alps or something."

   

5. "It is a hard problem. I have to say there's quite a lot of brain damage required to be good at cell manufacturing — it's like a brain damage high."
6. "Amazon Web Services became more valuable than the entire rest of Amazon. I think there's some kind of opportunity there that's pretty significant for Tesla down the road. Nobody's really factoring that in." (Musk was envisioning renting out the spare computing power from a fleet of 100 million Tesla vehicles.)
7. "It is getting a little crazy these days. To first approximation, the probability that a homicidal maniac will try to kill you is proportionate to how many homicidal maniacs hear your name. So they hear my name a lot — I'm like, okay, I'm on the list. Think of John Lennon who was singing about, 'Hey, can't we all just be nice to each other,' and then he got shot by one of his fans. Like, okay, we'll try to avoid that."

8. "I have had some conversations with him and he does call me out of the blue for no reason. A lot of his friends now have Teslas and they all love it, and he's a huge fan of the Cybertruck." (Musk was discussing his contact with Donald Trump.)

   

9. "It's tough sledding out there for EVs. Almost every manufacturer has announced reductions in their electric vehicle plans. Now Tesla, we're going to increase, but it is not an easy market."
10. "There's enough lithium refining if you count China. If there's a geopolitical challenge on that front, then there may be a shortage of lithium. I think it's pretty important to be careful with geopolitical risk and just make sure that in a worst-case situation that Tesla is okay." (Musk on Tesla's plans to scale up its lithium refining.)
11. "I really would describe making a car more affordable like 'Game of Thrones' but pennies: Game of Pennies. To be frank, it's not the funnest job in the world, chiseling pennies — it's like washing the dishes."
12. "We're headed for a wild future, I mean wild, wild, wild. Cars will drive themselves, people will have super helpful, humanoid help robots. I think it will get to this point where it'll be odd not to have a robot buddy, not to have your C-3PO and R2-D2." (Musk was touting Tesla's self-driving cars and Optimus humanoid robots.)