Standing in a vast field of muddy wasteland that wouldn't look out of place in an apocalyptic movie scene, Elon Musk exuded his usual mix of optimism and self-deprecating humour.

Musk had trekked to these inhospitable outskirts of Shanghai on a rainy Monday to break ground on Tesla's first car production site outside the US. And in typical Musk fashion, he was big on promises and can-do attitude, flanked by a phalanx of Chinese officials who are keen backers of Tesla's beachhead in China, the world's largest automobile market.

The build-up to the event was vintage Musk: a rapid-fire string of tweets bubbling with excitement, a dose of star power (his on-again, off-again girlfriend, the rapper Grimes, accompanied him on his China trip), and an aggressive timetable even for China's standards, where centralised planning isn't foreign to the concept of moonshot construction projects. Tesla wants the factory to start pumping out Model 3 cars by the end of the year.

For all the fanfare and official hobnobbing, Musk injected a dose of juvenile comic relief into the event. His popular Twitter feed suddenly featured a new profile picture that showed the billionaire with a scribbled curly moustache so clumsily executed that it looked like a fiendish – if harmless – hack. A Musk spokesman later confirmed that the tweet was in fact real and authored by the main man himself.