Earlier this week, Tesla tweeted the latest update on the company’s “Master Plan.” It’s… bad. Sloppy. Ludicrously vague. The Verge’s Andrew Hawkins summed it up well: Tesla’s new ‘Master Plan’ sounds like AI slop.
It’s significantly less coherent than the previous three master plans (from 2006, 2016, and 2023 respectively). Also, you can only find it on X.com. Tesla’s website still only lists the first three master plans.
This is a good excuse to reflect on those previous three master plans. Barely any of the stated objectives from those previous plans have been achieved. Probably none of the stated objectives in Master Plan 4 will be achieved either. “Plan” is, in fact, a misnomer. We should understand these Master Plans as public relations interventions. They are crafted by Elon Musk as acts of futurism that are meant to improve the company’s present-day public standing.
Or, as I mentioned on bluesky last week: The single most important thing to understand about digital futurism is that, when Elon’s predictions fail to materialize, he doesn’t have to give the money back.
The “Plan” in 2006 was to (1) start with an expensive sports car, then (2) use the money to build an affordable car, and then (3) use that money to build an even more affordable car, (4) all while providing zero emission electric power generation options.
There was a simple hitch in this plan: the company was operating at a loss. You can’t plow the money from the expensive sports car into an affordable car if you aren’t making money from the expensive sports car to begin with. Instead, Tesla Motors got really good at government arbitrage — gaming California’s emissions tax credit system.
A decade later (2016), Tesla released "Master Plan, Part Deux.” The company still hadn’t released the Tesla Model 3 yet (step 2 of the original plan). Musk needed a new story to tell. And the story was about how his electric car company would transform the entire transportation system. The new plan included four main components:
- Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage
- Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments
- Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
- Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it
It has been nearly a decade. Tesla has completed zero (0) of these tasks. But the stock value has increased two-hundredfold.
The whole point of the third master plan was to fix the vibes. The Inflation Reduction Act been signed into law a few months earlier. The IRA contained provisions for several hundred billion in new government spending. Elon got dollar signs in his eyes. If the future was going to be full of government spending on the clean energy transition, then of course Tesla would remake itself as the world’s foremost clean energy transition company.
Now we have Master Plan Part IV.
In this latest installment, Tesla is barely a car company anymore, and Elon no longer cares about the climate crisis. Sustainable energy is out. “Sustainable Abundance” is in. (Thanks, Ezra and Derek.) Now Tesla “make[s] physical products at scale and at a low cost with the goal of making life better for everyone.” It “build[s] the products and services that bring AI into the physical world.” Sure.
None of this tells us anything about the actual future of Tesla as a trillion-dollar producer of material objects. The point of these master plans is to make the stock number go up, or at least to prevent the number from trending down.
That isn’t NOT a financial bubble. Eventually, at some point, the products will need to generate more revenue than they cost. But bubbles can keep going for a long time — particularly when you have a general environment of lax regulatory enforcement, extreme wealth inequality, and accounting shenanigans.
Tesla has managed to keep inflating the bubble for two decades. It’s a mistake to treat their plans and promises as indicators of what the future will look like. That just isn’t the game any of these companies are playing.
