Elon Musk says Tesla will come to Russia

Entrepreneur Elon Musk announced that Tesla may soon officially enter the Russian market.

"I think we're close to establishing a Tesla presence in Russia [and] more broadly in Kazakhstan and neighboring regions,” Musk told the New Knowledge Russian innovation forum via video link.

In addition, Tesla is potentially considering Russia as a location of its production.

When asked about the production location in China, Musk replied that they had a factory in Shanghai and noted that he wanted the company's factories to be located in other parts of the world, including in Russia.

Musk also spoke in favor of strengthening communication between Russia and the United States. When asked why he decided to take part in the forum, the entrepreneur explained that, from his point of view, it was necessary to establish contacts and strengthen dialogue between the two countries.

Tesla sales offices are currently open in the USA, Mexico, Europe, including France, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, Portugal, as well as in the UAE, China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The company's production lines are located in the USA (California, Nevada, New York, Texas), China and Germany.

Last year, the company produced 509,737 cars, of which 499,550 were delivered to customers at the beginning of 2021. In the first quarter of this year, Tesla produced 180,338 cars, having thus increased production by 76 percent compared to the same period in 2020. As many as 184,800 vehicles were delivered to customers (as of April 2).

Elon Musk admires Russia and dreams of Mars

Speaking at the forum, Elon Musk also said that he was impressed by Russia's achievements.

"I admire the achievements of Russia. I admire the achievements of the USSR in rocket science,” Musk said.

According to him, Russia's victories are impressive and he is confident that Russia will keep up this energy in the future.

"Tsiolkovsky was amazing. He was truly one of the greatest,” the entrepreneur said. "At SpaceX, we name our conference rooms after the great engineers and scientists of space, and one of our biggest conference rooms is named after Tsiolkovsky. And another after Korolev," Musk also said.

Discussing the prospects for cooperation between Russia and the United States in the development of the International Space Station (ISS), Musk pointed our that it was wrong to stop at something.

"We need to move on. The next logical step is a base on the Moon," said the entrepreneur.

Elon Musk believes that man will subsequently build a base on Mars, and then even a city on the Red Planet.

"Life in glass domes at first. Eventually, terraformed to support life, like Earth,” he said. "Terraforming will be too slow to be relevant in our lifetime. However, we can establish a human base their in our lifetime. At least a future spacefaring civilization — discovering our ruins — will be impressed humans got that far," he told the forum.

Stressing out the need to move forward, the SpaceX founder quoted Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whom he considers one of the founding fathers of space engineering: "The Earth is a cradle, but we cannot stay in a cradle all the time."