Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Thursday that he would not sell any more Tesla stock for the next two years.
Speaking in a Spaces Twitter audio chat, Musk said he predicts the economy will be in a “severe recession” in 2023, with lower consumer demand.
Tesla shares rose 3% to $129.23 in after-hours trading on Thursday after falling 11% during regular trading hours.
Musk has previously made guarantees that he would not sell Tesla stock prior to the sale. Last week, Musk revealed one other $3.6 billion in stock sales, taking the total to almost $40 billion since the end of this 12 months and frustrating investors as the company’s shares fall to greater than two-year lows.
“I needed to sell some stock to be certain it was dry powder… to cover the worst-case scenario,” the billionaire said.
He said Tesla’s board is open to a share buyback, but that will rely on the scale of the recession.
![Tesla logo](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/musk-tesla-shares1-1.jpg?w=1024)
Musk said Tesla is near picking a location for its recent “Gigafactory.” Tesla may announce construction of a “Gigafactory” in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon as early as Friday, with an initial investment of between $800 million and $1 billion, local newspaper Reforma reported on Monday.
When asked if he would hire someone like enterprise capitalist David Sacks to run Twitter so he could concentrate on Tesla, Musk dodged the query and said Twitter is a comparatively easy business.
“(Twitter) is perhaps 10% of Tesla’s complexity,” Musk said.
Musk increasingly used Twitter’s live audio platform to guage his product and strategic decisions at the social media company he took private in October in a $44 billion deal.
A few of his appearances have change into controversial, including an exchange with a former Twitter engineer who questioned his apparent plan to rewrite significant amounts of the company’s source code.