Tesla's Fourth Master Plan: A Vague Vision of AI and Robotics Dominance

Tesla has a new master plan -- it just doesn't have any specifics

Yesterday afternoon, while much of the country enjoyed Labor Day, Tesla CEO Elon Musk published a new master plan for the company to his social media platform. It's the fourth such document for Tesla, replacing the goals Musk laid out in 2023 when he said the company would sell 20 million EVs a year in 2030. This time, it is not entirely sure what Tesla's plan actually entails. The text, which was reads as though it was written by AI, is at times anodyne, at times confusing, but always free of specifics. Each iteration of the master plan is Tesla's north star, the new plan reads, promising to "to deliver unconstrained sustainability without compromise," whatever that actually means. "Now, we are combining our manufacturing capabilities with our autonomous prowess to deliver new products and services that will accelerate global prosperity and human thriving driven by economic growth shared by all," reads the plan. This is an interesting statement considering each time Tesla has tried to build a new model the result has been months and months of "production difficulties," not to mention the multiple federal safety investigations into the company's autonomous and partially automated driving systems. Tesla also disbanded the team building its "Dojo" supercomputer several weeks ago. Much touted by Musk in the past as the key to beating autonomous vehicle developers like Waymo (which has already deployed commercially in several cities), Tesla will no longer rely on this in-house resource and instead rely on external companies, according to Bloomberg. "Shortages in resources can be remedied by improved technology, greater innovation and new ideas," the plan continues. Then plan veers into corporate buzzwords, with statements like "[o]ur desire to push beyond what is considered achievable will foster the growth needed for truly sustainable abundance." In keeping with Musk's recent robot obsession, there's very little mention of Tesla electric vehicles other than a brief mention of autonomous vehicles, but there is quite a lot of text devoted to the company's humanoid robot. "Jobs tasks that are particularly monotonous or dangerous can now be accomplished by other means," it states, blithely eliding the fact that it makes very little sense to compromise an industrial robot with a bipedal humanoid body, as evinced by the non-humanoid form factors of just about every industrial robot working today. Robot arms mounted to the floor don't need to worry about balance, and nor do quadraped robots with wheels.

Tesla's 4th 'Master Plan' reads like LLM-generated nonsense | TechCrunch

Tesla has published its fourth "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 from 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. (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, semitruck, 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.

Tesla's fourth 'Master Plan' reads like LLM-generated nonsense | TechCrunch

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. (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.

Tesla's new 'Master Plan' sounds like AI slop

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." The damage to Tesla's brand was staggering. The company's sales are in decline in all major markets across the world, thanks to growing competition and Musk's political affiliations. Tesla's attempts to recapture some of that old magic, with robots and robotaxis, have been largely unsuccessful. This new plan is the latest effort to rekindle some sort of vision. If you're confused about what Tesla is promising, you're not alone. X users commented that the plan "reads more like a glorified TED Talk than a Gannt Chart with deadlines and KPIs." Instead, we get philosophical talk about "infinite growth, AI solving scarcity, and robots freeing up your time." The previous Master Plans were visionary documents, too, but with more of an emphasis on deliverable products and action items, rather than amorphous platitudes and buzzword salad. To be sure, Elon Musk seems to regret some of the things that were included in the previous plans. In a recent post on X, he admitted that second plan remains unfinished, but promises that it will be complete by "next year." Master Plan 3 was "too complex for almost anyone to understand," he said, touting the fourth plan as "concise." The focus on "sustainable abundance" is telling. We've been hearing a lot about abundance these days, mostly from the eponymous book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that outlines a plan for more housing, more clean energy, and more prosperity -- as achieved through deregulation and higher productivity. There's also the Abundance Institute, a think tank focused on innovation and prosperity with a heavy focus on AI policy. But the idea of "abundance" has since achieved escape velocity and now seems to be an umbrella term for libertarians and centrist Democrats to push back against leftists and democratic socialists calling for universal healthcare and higher taxes on the rich. To me, the more telling word choice in Master Plan 4 is "infinite." The document declares that "growth is infinite," suggesting that traditional barriers like labor, real estate, finances, or natural resources should not stand in the way of Tesla's upward trajectory. It's one of Musk's favorite rhetorical devices. He has described customer demand in Tesla's vehicles as "infinite." The Cybertruck's towing capacity is also "infinite." (It's actually rated for 11,000 lbs, which last I checked is a long way off from infinite.) What it really is -- to borrow another phrase from the Tesla playbook -- is ludicrous. The company's self-driving cars don't really drive themselves, solar roofs are on the back burner, the mythical $25,000 "Model 2" got canceled, and your Tesla won't make you money while you sleep. Its robots can't even serve a bucket of popcorn without some heavy human involvement. Musk is high on his own supply, and this latest Master Plan is evidence of that.

Elon Musk's new Tesla Master Plan promises abundance for everyone

So you're telling me I don't have to open those cans myself? Credit: Tesla Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a new Master Plan, and we're never been less sure on what's it really about. The first "Master Plan" - a broad stroke company strategy penned by Elon Musk back in 2006 - was simple enough: Build a quick, fancy electric sports car, use the proceeds (and the attention) to build a more affordable electric car, then follow up with an electric car that'll be affordable enough to sell en masse and kickstart an electric vehicle revolution. The follow-up to that plan was mostly about the advent of self-driving tech, which could transform your Tesla into an autonomous taxi that could earn you money; we're seeing the first steps towards that happening now with Tesla's Robotaxi service. The third Master Plan was a bit harder to process, as it was a much longer document that mostly steered away from cars and focused on renewable energy. Finally, the fourth Master Plan, revealed on Monday by Tesla's official account on X, once again shifts focus, this time onto robotics and AI. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. The key word, used several times in the text, is "sustainable abundance." "We are combining our manufacturing capabilities with our autonomous prowess to deliver new products and services that will accelerate global prosperity and human thriving driven by economic growth shared by all," says the article. Unfortunately, there's very little tangible explanation on how, exactly, Tesla aims to achieve this. Optimus, the company's humanoid robot, is mentioned as being able to accomplish monotonous and dangerous tasks. But in reality, Optimus isn't available to the public yet, and its supposedly high level of autonomy, based on what we've seen so far, is dubious at best. And that, aside from a quick repeat of previous claims about autonomous vehicles "dramatically improving the affordability, availability and safety of transportation," is pretty much it. The final part of the text explains just how hard it'll be to eliminate scarcity. While the idea of eliminating scarcity to make a world where everyone lives in abundance sounds great, it's hard to glean from this text how Tesla plans to achieve that. The Robotaxis are here, but given how slow Tesla's progress on Full Self-Driving has been so far, it might take a while before they're widely available, let alone disrupting industries as Musk would have you believe. As for Optimus, we don't know how capable it will be, or how much it will cost. Tesla might have a plan to scale it to a level where every household has one or three (Musk said it will be 10 times bigger than the next biggest product ever made), but the latest Master Plan doesn't explain that bit. We guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Tesla Just Published a New "Master Plan" and Um, How Do We Say This

Elon Musk's Tesla has revealed its new "master plan" -- and it's so chock-full of meaningless corporate buzzwords, we can't help but suspect that it was generated by an AI chatbot. The so-called "Master Plan Part IV" follows up on Musk's preceding "master plan" installment, which underwhelmed investors back in early 2023 with a vague promise to greatly streamline manufacturing, the consequent release of a cheaper EV, and in-house lithium refinement for batteries. The embattled company's followup master plan isn't much more confidence-inducing, giving a sense of a lack of vision as Tesla deals with the fallout of plummeting sales, disastrous finances, and an extremely polarizing CEO at the helm. For starters, the plan was laid out in a carefully-formatted tweet -- not a presentation or PDF -- on Musk's social media platform X. It's void of virtually any specifics, as Ars Technica points out, reading suspiciously like it may have been assembled by xAI's chatbot Grok. And that's just the window dressing. The plan doesn't mention the company's plans for a robotaxi, its lineup of cars is barely an afterthought, and production goals -- let alone any other form of concrete, measurable metrics the company could hold itself to -- are nowhere to be found. The plan was published mere hours after Musk tweeted that roughly 80 percent of Tesla's value will come from the company's humanoid robot, Optimus, and doubled down on that commitment. "This next chapter in Tesla's story will help create a world we've only just begun to imagine and will do so at a scale that we have yet to see," the plan reads. "We are building the products and services that bring AI into the physical world." "Our desire to push beyond what is considered achievable will foster the growth needed for truly sustainable abundance," the company continued, breathlessly. In other words... expect robots. And AI. And other trendy things that many other companies are working on, often with more impressive results than Tesla, which is rapidly losing its head start on electric cars. The hazy nature of the company's master plan was met with incredulity on X, with one user calling it out as being "disappointing with its extremely vague, almost AI-generated-rambling-like description, as if I were reading some random company's PR bullsh*t without any specifics." "Where is the plan, though?" another user quipped. Others were quick to point out the suspicious use of em-dashes, a choice of punctuation that has quickly become a telltale sign of AI-generated text. "Grok, did you write this? I see a lot of em-dashes," one user wrote. The master plan only makes cursory mentions of Tesla's existing lineup of electric vehicles, aligning with Musk's suspected desire to abandon the automotive market and embrace AI and humanoid robots instead. It doesn't even make a single mention of the company's plans for a "Cybercab" autonomous ride-hailing service, which -- at least until recently -- had become central to Musk's vision for the company. Tesla has seemingly come a long way from its original roots. In its 2006 "Secret Master Plan" climate manifesto, which mysteriously disappeared from the EV maker's website last year, Tesla promised to fight climate change by electrifying cars and powering them with solar energy. Almost two decades on, it seems like Musk is trying to distract investors from disastrous car sales by dangling a carrot in the form of a humanoid robot that will allegedly make Tesla a $25 trillion company. The company's finances are in freefall, despite investors propping up an enormous, $1 trillion valuation. Shares have risen by over ten percent over the past month, but are still down significantly since the beginning of the year. Without any coherent vision for its near future, investors will likely have some tough questions for the company's leadership in the months to come. What happened to Musk's long-touted vision for a robotaxi service? Has Tesla given up on holding itself accountable by publicizing its actual goals? Its Master Plan Part IV certainly leaves plenty to be desired, painting a picture of a scrambling automaker trying to reinvent itself during a crisis of its CEO's own making.