Political media scholar Dave Karpf (2025) has called Tesla’s recently announced new master plan “bad. Sloppy. Ludicrously vague.” What’s more, he says that it is “significantly less coherent than the previous three master plans (from 2006, 2016, and 2023 respectively)” (Tesla, 2025).
Not that your expectations should have been high. Almost none of the objectives in Tesla’s three previous plans have been achieved, according to Karpf. For example, a third plan in 2023 frames “Tesla not as a car company but as a ‘sustainable energy’ company. But much of its analysis has nothing to do with Tesla. There’s an entire section on heat pumps, of all things. (Heat pumps are great! Tesla is not, and has never been, in the heat pump business)” (2025, original italics).
The fourth plan’s goals are even less tangible. Karpf (2025) walks through vague language about “sustainable abundance.” For example, “that 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.’”
What happens if vibes are no longer enough?
Karpf argues that the plan does not tell “us anything about the actual future of Tesla as a trillion-dollar producer of material objects” (2025, original italics). This is because the purpose of the plan isn’t to be a tangible road map but rather to protect Tesla’s current stock price. It’s purely a public relations exercise.
The most important dynamic of this exercise is that when the plan’s predictions “fail to materialize,” company head Elon Musk “doesn’t have to give the money back.” In other words, Karpf (2025) argues that there’s no real accountability — it’s all about vibes.
Karpf was hardly the only observer who criticized the vagueness of the new plan. Even Musk apparently agreed. Sean O’Kane of TechCrunch (2025) noted that 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.”
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RE:SOURCES
- Karpf, Dave; 2025. “Tesla’s Roadmap to Nowhere.” The Future, Now and Then. Posted Sept. 4.
- O’Kane, Sean; 2025. “Tesla’s 4th ‘Master Plan’ reads like LLM-generated nonsense.” TechCrunch. Posted Sept. 2.
- Tesla; 2025. “Master Plans.” Accessed Sept. 6.
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