Eight key questions Musk responded to in Twitter Spaces

By the way, I was still doing Tesla's work during that time, and Tesla's rhythm in execution was not disrupted at all.

Fundamentally, Tesla is a much more complex beast than Twitter. There is much less to do to run Twitter, which is a subset of Tesla's complexity.

It (Twitter) has some scale, but it's more than an order of magnitude less complex than Tesla. My focus will be primarily on Tesla.

I am not going to suppress my views just to boost the stock price. Something like this is not something I would do.

(The impact of political commentary on car demand) It does have only a very, very small impact, and I really don't think it's a significant factor.

I think we are in a recession, and I think 2023 is going to be a pretty severe recession. In my opinion, the severity will be comparable to 2009.

I can imagine that Tesla will be able to weather the coming economic storm better than any other company. But if you're a ship in the middle of a storm, even if you're a very big, very good ship, you're still going to get crushed by the storm.

My guess is that Warren Buffett will be buying a lot of stocks next year. Because if a company has very strong fundamentals and the market panics, obviously, that's a good time to buy the stock.

In order to keep demand constant, you will have to lower the price of your car as a result, which is the case if you want to keep demand constant. If you want to increase demand, you will have to further reduce the price of the car.

My preference is, let's grow as fast as possible without putting the company in danger. This means that during a recession, margins will be low, if not negative.

The status quo is that our gross margins are higher than any other company, which gives us more room to lower them to maintain or increase demand.

Even if your margins are extremely low when you sell a car, it will be worth a lot of money to subsequently upgrade it to autonomous driving.

We are actually using capital as fast as we can and without waste.

I just mentioned the lithium refinery and the cathode refinery. They're both important for long-term growth, and we're making those investments.

I can't say too much, but we're very close to completing the site selection for our next super plant and we want to be careful in that regard.

In the long run, in my best guess, within five years Tesla could be the most valuable company in the world.

The third part of Ambition is purely about scale, and you don't even think in terms of dollars, you need to think in terms of tons.

We do expect to produce over a billion kilowatt hours of battery packs per year, both for stationary energy storage and vehicles, if we don't reach two billion kilowatt hours

I needed to sell some stock before to make sure I had bullets for the worst case scenario.

I promise that I will not sell any more stock in the last two years or so. Absolutely no selling next year, no matter what the situation is, and probably not the year after that.

Stock buybacks.

We need to see what happens with the recession. If things look like, hey, we're in good shape from a cash standpoint and the stock price is ridiculously low, then, at least my vote on the board will be in favor of a buyback.

Tesla and I have been using Twitter to advertise Tesla for free for a long time (laughs). My account and Tesla's account have been effective in building awareness of Tesla and driving real demand.