Tesla has published its fourth so-called “Master Plan,” and at a high level it is about how the company wants to lead the charge into planet-wide adoption of humanoid robots and sustainable energy.
But the post lacks an important building block of plans: specifics.
Even CEO Elon Musk agrees. In one of his only posts about the plan since it was published on Monday — sandwiched in between a steady stream of transphobia and immigration panic — he agreed it was fair to criticize the lack of specifics, and said the company will add more.
Who knows when that will happen? But right now, unlike the preceding master plan posts, this one is gauzy, generic, and reads like someone threw talking points from Musk and the “Abundance bros” into ChatGPT and published the result. (If it was Grok, it’s one of the most benign posts that AI chatbot has ever generated.)
The post is stuffed with sentences that sound like a kid imitating college-level discourse, such as: “The hallmark of meritocracy is creating opportunities that enable each person to use their skills to accomplish whatever they imagine.”
Why be so vague? Maybe it’s because Tesla has still not completed all of its goals from the second master plan, published all the way back in 2016, or its third, in 2023.
That second plan was also about taking huge swings, but it was specific in its ambitions. First, Musk wrote that Tesla would “create a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works” and “scale that throughout the world.” Tesla has a solar roof product, but it has been plagued by problems, redesigned multiple times, and has not reached any real scale in the U.S., let alone around the world.
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(Musk used this part of Master Plan 2 to justify Tesla’s recent offer to acquire SolarCity, a struggling company run by his cousins. Tesla spent years in court defending the acquisition, and ultimately prevailed.)
On the vehicle side, Musk promised in Plan 2 to bring a compact SUV, semi truck, pickup, and an electric bus to market. Tesla accomplished the first piece of that with the Model Y, which has proven extremely popular. But the Tesla Semi is still in development, the Cybertruck has failed to come close to its own sales goals, and the company has not expanded beyond those form factors into anything resembling a bus.
The final two prongs of the second Master Plan was to make Teslas fully autonomous via a software upgrade and to allow owners to add or subtract them to a large, shared network. Neither of those goals have been met.
The company is testing a small, invite-only robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, but the cars all have safety monitors riding in the front passenger seat. And Tesla has gone through multiple hardware revisions in the last nine years that, by Musk’s own admission, likely means an enormous number of cars already on the road do not, as promised, have the right tech to become fully autonomous. (The first and second Master Plans have been removed from Tesla’s website as part of a larger purge.)
Master Plan 3 was about using Tesla as a shining example to convince the world that a sustainable economy is achievable. Again, quite grand! But Tesla went so deep on specifics that it released a 41-page white paper backing up its projections. The company and the world have, almost by definition, not accomplished much of what is included in that paper. In the meantime, Musk spent $300 million to help elect a president who is actively fighting the adoption of cleaner, cheaper, sustainable energy.
Musk spent the last few years trying to redefine Tesla. It’s not a carmaker, it’s an AI and robotics company, he says repeatedly. There’s some truth to that, though it doesn’t change the fact that the overwhelming majority of the company’s revenue still comes from the (increasingly hard) business of making and selling electric vehicles.
The belief that Tesla will complete this transition is a huge driver of its stock price, so it’s beneficial for the company to lean way into the idea. So of course Master Plan 4 is wide-eyed.
But Tesla used to back up those ambitions with goals and benchmarks that it could be measured against. And Musk used to at least try to argue the case. He wrote the first two plans and spent four hours on a stage with other executives diving into the details of the more professionalized third version.
This time around, Tesla’s “Master Plan” was published on a federal holiday, and its CEO spent the day spreading fear about marginalized people.
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