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Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X Holdings Corp., speaks at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., last month. (Apu Gomes/Getty Images/TNS)

Elon Musk responded to Tesla Inc. investors’ renewed approval of his massive compensation plan in kind, making absurd predictions that he could enrich shareholders again.

After Tesla’s general counsel confirmed on Thursday that investors supported the issuance of stock options to Musk worth up to $55.8 billion, the CEO said the company’s robot manufacturing may one day overshadow the company’s car business.

Tesla has two humanoid robot prototypes that pick battery cells from the end of a production line in California and place them in shipping containers. “Quite a few” others drive around the company’s offices in Palo Alto, Musk said during the company’s annual shareholder meeting.

The CEO doesn’t expect the bot – called Optimus – to be produced in limited numbers until next year, when Tesla could test a few thousand of them in its own factories. He did, however, make a lofty prediction that Tesla could one day make around $1 trillion in annual profits from the product, but he didn’t give a timeframe.

“If the price-earnings ratio is, say, 20 or 25 or something like that, that would mean a market cap of $20 trillion for Optimus alone,” Musk said. “It’s within the realm of possibility that Tesla could reach a valuation 10 times that of the most valuable company today.”

Work on robots was at the heart of an ultimatum Musk issued earlier this year. The CEO openly pressured Tesla’s board to increase his stake in the company to around 25 percent, saying he would otherwise prefer to develop artificial intelligence and robotic products elsewhere.

Musk has always set ambitious goals, but he has failed to achieve them on time – if at all. For example, he was correct in 2019 when he said that Tesla could one day become a half-trillion-dollar company by developing self-driving technology. But his repeated predictions that Tesla is on the verge of turning customers’ cars into robotaxis have not come to pass.

This isn’t the first business within Tesla that Musk has predicted will one day compete with automaking, either. The company still generates only a fraction of its revenue from its energy generation and storage products, despite the CEO saying years ago that it could grow to about the same size as Tesla’s automotive division.

When it came to the auto business, Musk was much more reserved.

“It’s a tough business out there,” he said, noting that General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and other manufacturers have scaled back their plans to produce electric vehicles. “Tesla, we’re going to produce more now, but it’s not an easy market.”