- Elon Musk said that Tesla would continue to do well even if he was kidnapped by aliens.
- However, he intends to stay as long as he can be useful, he said at Tesla's 2022 Cyber Roundup.
- Musk was responding to a question from a stock owner regarding the company's succession plans.
Elon Musk has no plans of leaving Tesla but thinks that the company would continue to perform well without him.
"We have a very talented team here. So I think Tesla, you know, would continue to do very well even if I was kidnapped by aliens, or went back to my home planet," the Tesla CEO said at the firm's 2022 Cyber roundup meeting of stock owners.
He was responding to a question from stockholder Gary Black, a managing partner of the Future Fund, concerning how Tesla's board would potentially handle his succession.
Musk is embroiled in an ongoing legal battle following his decision to pull out of a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, Black wanted to know how he would split his time should a judge rule that he has to take over the social media giant.
Musk said Tesla is gathering a lot of momentum and has a "very exciting" product roadmap that will last a long time.
"I intend to stay with Tesla as long as I can be useful," Musk said, adding that he thought that he could be most useful with product design and manufacturing parts of the business.
During the more than two-hour-long presentation, Musk revealed the firm had manufactured its three millionth car and suggested that the firm could eventually build between 10 and 12 Gigafactories as it expands.
He said that thanks to the hard work of the Tesla team, the company had reached a production run rate of 1.5 million vehicles already this year, and was on track for 2 million by the close of 2022. Musk has ambitions to build 20 million cars a year by 2030.
"I'm very excited about the future of the company and I think it's got a very bright future, even without me," Musk said. "I'm not leaving, to be clear."
The world's richest man, who was born in South Africa, has previously joked that Mars is his home planet. He's regularly talked about his ambition for humanity to eventually be a multiplanetary species. He hopes that SpaceX, the rocket company he founded, can play an important part in that.
Despite Tesla's continued growth, Musk has been involved in multiple controversies. Tesla is facing multiple lawsuits brought by African-American former and current employees regarding accusations of racial harassment in its factories.
Documents obtained by Insider's Julia Black, recently revealed that Musk secretly fathered twins with a senior executive at Neuralink.