Elon Musk says a third Tesla car factory in the US is 'likely' after it finishes Austin and Berlin construction

• A third Tesla car factory in the US is likely, Elon Musk said on a podcast released Monday.
• Tesla announced in July that its second US car factory would be in Austin, Texas.
• It's also building a Gigafactory in Europe, near Berlin, Germany, and operates one in Shanghai, China.

Tesla's potential third car factory in the United States would likely be within the Northeast, Elon Musk said in a new interview published Monday.

The CEO told Automotive News in a podcast that "at some point there'll be a third Gigafactory, probably."

Currently, Tesla is building new factories in Austin, Texas and Berlin, Germany to augment its production in Fremont, California and Shanghai, China. The company also makes battery components in Reno, Nevada and Buffalo, New York.

"This is literally a spur of the moment rough guess, probably we'd start construction in four years-ish," Musk said. "That's just like my sort of stream-of-consciousness guess."

As for moving Tesla's headquarters out of California — a move Musk threatened at the height of coronavirus lockdowns that required Tesla to shutter its main US factory — much remains to be decided.

"There's no question that our headquarters will remain in California in the short term," Musk said. "Long term we'll have to see. Certainly the vast majority of the Tesla management and engineering staff is in California. So, that is certainly our headquarters for now and sometime into the future."