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.
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