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

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.