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. And that’s because we judge publicly traded companies based on their stock performance, which is practically untethered from their net revenues.
The most noteworthy part of Master Plan IV isn’t the rosy Optimus/AI predictions. It’s the date. Elon went a decade between the first two plans, seven years between the second and third plans, and just two years between the third and fourth.
If Tesla’s underlying business was going well, Elon Musk wouldn’t need to ring this particular bell so frequently. By 2031, I estimate he will be releasing a new Master Plan every eleven hours. It’s the beginning of an exponential curve! Imagine a future of unlimited PR jargon.
