It’s official. The phrase “sustainable” is gone from Tesla’s mission assertion.
For over a decade, Tesla’s guiding star was arguably probably the most impactful company mission assertion of the twenty first century. However over the previous few years, we now have watched the corporate slowly drift away from its environmental roots.
Now, Elon Musk has confirmed the ultimate step in that divorce, rebranding the corporate’s purpose from “Sustainable Abundance” to easily “Wonderful Abundance.”
The evolution of Tesla’s mission assertion tells the story of the corporate’s shifting priorities higher than any earnings name might.
Initially, the mission was particular and focused: “To speed up the appearance of sustainable transport.”
This was the Tesla of the Roadster, the Mannequin S, and the Mannequin 3. The purpose was to show that electrical automobiles may very well be higher than gasoline automobiles and to drive the trade to vary.
As Tesla acquired SolarCity and expanded into vitality storage with Powerwall and Megapack, the mission naturally developed to be extra inclusive: “To speed up the appearance of sustainable vitality.”
That was the height of Tesla’s climate-focused narrative. It was concerning the ecosystem: photo voltaic, storage, and transport working collectively to decarbonize the grid.
The transition made sense with the unique mission as you want transport to be electrical to be able to be sustainable and powered by renewable vitality.
Nonetheless, lately, particularly across the launch of Grasp Plan Half 3 and the rise of the Optimus bot venture, Musk started utilizing the phrase “Sustainable Abundance.” It moved the goalposts from “vitality” (a tangible local weather metric) to “abundance” (an financial idea pushed by automation and AI).
On Christmas Eve, Musk took to X to announce the ultimate mutation of the mission:
“Am altering the Tesla mission wording from: Sustainable Abundance To Wonderful Abundance.”
As for why, Musk merely mentioned, “The latter is extra joyful.”
Right here is the tweet:
By eradicating “sustainable,” Tesla is signaling that its main focus is not the atmosphere or the local weather disaster. “Wonderful Abundance” is a reference to the post-scarcity future Musk believes he’s constructing by general-purpose humanoid robots (Optimus) and Synthetic Basic Intelligence (AGI).
On this new mission, electrical automobiles and renewables are simply instruments to assist construct this hypothetical utopia.
Electrek’s Take
I hate to say “I advised you so,” however I really feel totally vindicated.
Longtime readers know that I made the troublesome choice to promote my Tesla shares again in 2024. On the time, I wrote a submit explaining that my most important purpose for promoting was my perception that Tesla was shifting away from its mission to speed up the world’s introduction of sustainable vitality.
I obtained a whole lot of hate for that article. They mentioned I didn’t perceive the “larger image.” I did. I nonetheless do. I simply don’t consider in it, and I don’t wish to be invested in it.
This tweet confirms precisely what I used to be seeing. The elimination of the phrase “sustainable” isn’t simply semantics; it’s a declaration of intent. The corporate that kickstarted the EV revolution is successfully tired of it. Musk is now chasing a sci-fi fantasy of infinite financial output, and he’s doing it in a scary trend.
Moreover, Musk’s reasoning that “Wonderful Abundance” is “extra joyful” rings extremely hole once you take a look at his habits on his social media platform.
He talks about making a robotic utopia on one hand, however on the opposite, he spends his days amplifying divisive rhetoric: saying that “white folks ought to reclaim their nations”:
It’s jarring to listen to about “pleasure” from a person who is continually bitching about “white nations going away” and fascinating with substitute idea content material.
It’s scary stuff for anybody who is aware of historical past. It looks like he’s finishing his villain arc.
Simply over every week in the past, he was telling different billionaires that it isn’t value giving your cash away as a result of his hypothetical utopia will quickly end in “excessive common revenue”:
This nonsense is evil. If you wish to speak about common revenue, speak about how precisely to implement it.
The concept folks don’t must “get monetary savings” and that charity gained’t be wanted reveals Musk is totally disconnected from actuality.
If AI actually brings an age of abundance, the one means it turns into “common excessive revenue” is that if the billionaires, and certain trillionaires at that time, by some means grow to be charitable, or if the inhabitants decides to take all of it from them.
What these “age of abundance” proponents by no means point out is the mechanism for this finish to poverty.
If AI generates huge wealth, that capital will initially focus within the palms of the billionaires who personal the fashions and the information feeding them. Our information. How does that wealth translate into ‘Common Excessive Earnings’? It gained’t magically trickle down. We all know that by now.
With the political panorama captured by ultra-high-net-worth people who persistently block larger taxation, the one path to redistribution is thru the very factor Musk is dismissing: charity. Both they provide the wealth away or permit their captured political class to boost their very own taxes.
Musk’s argument boils right down to, ‘There is no such thing as a have to be beneficiant now; wait till we now have amassed much more wealth, then we’ll grow to be by some means beneficiant.’ It exposes a elementary contradiction within the promised ‘age of abundance.’
I’m extraordinarily cautious of everybody who promotes this with no exact mechanism to switch the wealth, particularly when they’re additionally crying about “white nations going away.”
FTC: We use revenue incomes auto affiliate hyperlinks. Extra.
