All the hypes around American billionaire Elon Musk’s visit to India next week came to a standstill on Saturday when he announced postponing of the visit to later this year.

Speculations were there that Musk would announce investment of $2-3 billion investment in India where he is interested in both electric vehicles and satellite broadband services, the country being one of the top in both these sectors.

“Unfortunately, very heavy Tesla obligations require that the visit to India be delayed, but I do very much look forward to visiting later this year,” Musk said in a post on X.

Tesla will be announcing its first quarter results on Tuesday and Musk has earnings call with analysts. According to industry experts, Musk has to handle a lot of questions around the performance of the company, which in the recent past has not seen investor friendly. The company’s shares have declined 40 per cent so far.

On Friday, shares of Tesla closed at $147.05 apiece, which was down 1.92 per cent from the previous close.

During his visit to India, Musk was also likely to meet India’s top space technology entrepreneurs in Delhi.

Interestingly, representative of Tesla, The Asia Group was also part of a meeting at the Ministry of Heavy Industries (MHI) on Thursday.

The meeting at MHI was chaired by Secretary, Kamran Rizvi, and Additional Secretary, Hanif Qureshi, with the stakeholders from the auto industry, including companies such as Hyundai Motor India, Maruti Suzuki India, Mahindra & Mahindra, Tata Motors, Toyota Kirloskar Motor and Vietnam-based VinFast, which is setting up a plant in Tamil Nadu.

“The meeting was one of the first meetings of the new EV policy, where all stakeholders were called to give their thoughts and the advisor from Tesla was just attending the meeting through video link, but he did not give any opinion related to the policy,” a source privy to the meeting had told businessline.

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