Elon Musk drops ‘sustainable’ from Tesla’s mission as he completes his villain arc

It’s official. The phrase “sustainable” is gone from Tesla’s mission assertion.

For over a decade, Tesla’s guiding star was arguably essentially the most impactful company mission assertion of the twenty first century. However over the previous couple of years, we’ve 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 objective from “Sustainable Abundance” to easily “Superb Abundance.”

The evolution of Tesla’s mission assertion tells the story of the corporate’s shifting priorities higher than any earnings name may.

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Initially, the mission was particular and focused: “To speed up the arrival of sustainable transport.”

This was the Tesla of the Roadster, the Mannequin S, and the Mannequin 3. The objective was to show that electrical automobiles may very well be higher than gasoline vehicles and to drive the trade to vary.

As Tesla acquired SolarCity and expanded into power storage with Powerwall and Megapack, the mission naturally developed to be extra inclusive: “To speed up the arrival of sustainable power.”

That was the height of Tesla’s climate-focused narrative. It was in regards to 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 power.

Nevertheless, in recent times, particularly across the launch of Grasp Plan Half 3 and the rise of the Optimus bot challenge, Musk started utilizing the phrase “Sustainable Abundance.” It moved the goalposts from “power” (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 Superb 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 major focus is now not the setting or the local weather disaster. “Superb Abundance” is a reference to the post-scarcity future Musk believes he’s constructing by means of general-purpose humanoid robots (Optimus) and Synthetic Basic Intelligence (AGI).

On this new mission, electrical vehicles and renewables are simply instruments to assist construct this hypothetical utopia.

Electrek’s Take

I hate to say “I instructed you so,” however I really feel completely vindicated.

Longtime readers know that I made the troublesome determination to promote my Tesla shares again in 2024. On the time, I wrote a submit explaining that my foremost purpose for promoting was my perception that Tesla was transferring away from its mission to speed up the world’s introduction of sustainable power.

I obtained lots of hate for that article. They mentioned I didn’t perceive the “larger image.” I did. I nonetheless do. I simply don’t imagine in it, and I don’t need to be invested in it.

This tweet confirms precisely what I used to be seeing. The removing of the phrase “sustainable” isn’t simply semantics; it’s a declaration of intent. The corporate that kickstarted the EV revolution is successfully uninterested in 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 “Superb Abundance” is “extra joyful” rings extremely hole while 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 consistently bitching about “white nations going away” and fascinating with substitute principle 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 price giving your cash away as a result of his hypothetical utopia will quickly lead to “excessive common earnings”:

This nonsense is evil. If you wish to discuss common earnings, discuss how precisely to implement it.

The concept that folks don’t must “lower your expenses” and that charity received’t be wanted reveals Musk is totally disconnected from actuality.

If AI actually brings an age of abundance, the one method it turns into “common excessive earnings” is that if the billionaires, and certain trillionaires at that time, one way or the other turn into 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 fingers of the billionaires who personal the fashions and the information feeding them. Our knowledge. How does that wealth translate into ‘Common Excessive Earnings’? It received’t magically trickle down. We all know that by now.

With the political panorama captured by ultra-high-net-worth people who persistently block greater taxation, the one path to redistribution is thru the very factor Musk is dismissing: charity. Both they offer the wealth away or permit their captured political class to lift their very own taxes.

Musk’s argument boils all the way down to, ‘There is no such thing as a must be beneficiant now; wait till we’ve collected much more wealth, then we’ll turn into one way or the other beneficiant.’ It exposes a basic contradiction within the promised ‘age of abundance.’

I’m extraordinarily cautious of everybody who promotes this and not using a exact mechanism to switch the wealth, particularly when they’re additionally crying about “white nations going away.”