is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
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Tesla’s latest “Master Plan” makes a few things clear right out of the gate: the company that was once known for accelerating the push toward a brighter future by popularizing electric vehicles and renewable energy is no longer interested in that quotidian stuff. Now, it’s all about artificial intelligence, humanoid robots, self-driving cars, and the new buzzy catchphrase that is currently lighting up the tech world: “sustainable abundance.”
At a breezy 983 words, Master Plan 4 is the shortest entry in the company’s ongoing series of mission statements. It’s the first one to be posted on X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, rather than on Tesla’s website. And it reads like it was written by the platform’s chatbot, Grok, with repeated use of em dashes and a suspiciously utopian tone about the future of AI and robotics.
But is it actually AI generated? It hardly matters, because the substance of the Master Plan is so vague, so empty, and so devoid of concrete proposals that it barely casts a shadow.
Here’s a sample:
Making technologically advanced products that are affordable and available at scale is required to build a flourishing and unconstrained society. It serves to further democratize society while raising everyone’s quality of life in the process. The hallmark of meritocracy is creating opportunities that enable each person to use their skills to accomplish whatever they imagine.
Compare that to the first Master Plan, published in 2006, which outlined the company’s desire to build an electric sports car, then use the revenue generated to build successively more affordable electric vehicles. Or Master Plan 2, published in 2016, which calls for building electric semi trucks and buses, developing self-driving vehicles, and then allowing customers to use those vehicles as profit-generating robotaxis. Or Master Plan 3, published in 2023, which positioned Tesla to lead the global effort to eliminate fossil fuels and convert the world to sustainable energy.
This is big, heady stuff! Sure, Tesla has barely touched the goals it listed in the second Master Plan, but at least they were goals in the traditional sense. This latest iteration is pure fluff. It risks floating away on a current of its own self-regard.
To be fair, a lot has happened between the third Master Plan and today. Elon Musk bought Twitter and transformed it into X. He founded xAI to compete in the global race to develop generative AI tools. He launched the Cybertruck, which subsequently flopped. He poured $300 million into the election of Donald Trump and then oversaw the slashing of billions of dollars from the federal government in the name of “efficiency.”
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