Billionaire and maverick entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for making what seem like wild predictions.
The Tesla boss’s latest prophecy came Tuesday as part of the announcement of a new negotiated payment deal for the electric car company — Musk will be paid only if Tesla hits aggressive market capitalization and operations targets.
Said Musk: “I actually see the potential for Tesla to become a trillion-dollar company within a 10-year period.” He made the prediction to Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC and The New York Times.
As Sorkin points out, Tesla is worth $59 billion today. If Musk were to grow Tesla to the $650 billion market cap target delineated in his payment plan — $350 billion shy of the prediction Musk himself has made — that would make the electric vehicle company one of the five largest companies in the United States, according to current valuations, says Sorkin. Even the $650 billion market capitalization is “a figure many experts would contend is laughably impossible,” Sorkin writes. Especially as Tesla, plagued by production delays, is frustrating investors.
But on the back of Musk’s trillion-dollar Tesla bet, here is a look at some of the other extreme predictions he has made in recent years.
