Tesla Investor Day: Everything you need to know about Elon Musk’s latest ‘master plan’

On Wednesday, March 1st, Tesla held its first ever investor day(Opens in a new tab) Event at his Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, and company boss Elon Musk unveiled his third major “master plan”. Basically, this is supposed to be the billionaire who sees Tesla heading for the next seven to 10 years.

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“All right, master plan part 3,” Musk said after being brought onto the stage.

“There is a clear path to a sustainable energy-abundant Earth,” he continued. “It doesn’t require us to destroy habitats, it doesn’t require us to be strict like stop using electricity or anything…”

Musk and Tesla executive Drew Baglino then proceeded to shut down what the company believes is necessary to transition to a fully sustainable economy within the next few decades.

A “large amount of battery energy storage” is needed but is not currently available at scale, Musk explained. However, Musk believes the world can be powered by clean energy by 2050 with a $10 trillion investment in manufacturing and battery storage.

The big upside is that Tesla is working on “next-gen” electric vehicles to further facilitate those plans. However, not much was offered in detail.

Another interesting tidbit: On the morning of the event, the four millionth Tesla vehicle was manufactured.

What was in previous Tesla master plans?

Musk’s third phase in his master plan has a broader focus than his previous iterations.

For example in Musk’s first master plan from 2006 blog entry(Opens in a new tab)The company had realistic goals like making money off a single car, the Roadster, in order to invest back into building more affordable lines like the Model S, Model 3, and Model Y.

As for Musk’s second master plan in 2016, Musk shared more robust ideas for Tesla, many of which never materialized. aptly named Master plan part Deux(Opens in a new tab), the Tesla CEO shared his vision of a self-driving vehicle that can be rented to others when you’re not using the car. The Tesla would literally drive itself to a renter’s pickup point and the owner of the Tesla could make money. Obviously this did not happen. The “city traffic with a high density of people” mentioned in the 2016 master plan does not exist either. And while the promised “heavy-duty truck” in the form of the Cybertruck finally seems to be on the way, it’s been 7 years and it’s still not quite there.

According to Musk, what will Tesla be up to in the coming years?

Part three, while not on the same scale as previous master plans, delivered a bit of Musk’s now-classic prognosis.

According to Musk, the auto industry will eventually transition to “all-electric and autonomous.” He said that driving a non-autonomous gas vehicle is “analogous to riding and using a clamshell phone.”

In terms of new products, Musk explained that heat pumps are an important part of the sustainable energy transition, and while Tesla has no plans at this time, “at some point, we could make a heat pump for a home,” Musk said.

A video also gave a new look at Tesla’s robot. The robot built another bot and moved quite slowly, prompting Musk to refer to Boston Dynamics’ impressive robotics.

“It obviously doesn’t do parkour,” he said.

And there was a brief mention of going to Mars! Musk said we “hope to get there eventually,” which is quite a contrast to Musk estimated(Opens in a new tab) 10 year time frame he did in 2011.

Where are the Tesla products?

On Musk’s own Twitter, users seemed pretty disappointed with Investor Day. The only real timeline offered came when Cybertruck was mentioned, which the company says will be available later this year.

Tesla stock too dropped(Opens in a new tab) during the event.

There was buzz(Opens in a new tab) ahead of the event on potentially new, affordable Tesla electric vehicles to be unveiled. There was also hope that there would be news of a robotaxi. Musk said in 2020 that Tesla would operate a fleet of one million robotic taxis. As of 2023, the company has none.

Musk himself spent his time offstage tweeting about matters unrelated to Tesla. While other executives presented, Musk introduced weighed in(Opens in a new tab) on a clip about Russia’s war in Ukraine. He also remembered(Opens in a new tab) about the time former cable news host Keith Olbermann was forced to tweet through his dogs’ Twitter account after being temporarily suspended from the platform.

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In recent months, Tesla investors have been Request(Opens in a new tab) with Musk to focus on his EV company because he thinks he’s been sidetracked by his social media acquisition, Twitter. In fact, Musk spent the final moments leading up to Tesla’s big first event answer(Opens in a new tab) to Twitter users like right-wing influencer @Catturd2.

In addition, one new report is likely to add to investors’ concerns about where Musk spends his time as the Tesla CEO seeks to jump on the latest tech trend by building an artificial intelligence lab to create his own AI chatbot platform.