Elon Musk has yet another new master plan for Tesla

While light on details, Tesla's plan seems to be betting its future on self-driving cars and humanoid robots

- Liam Denning

The lifespan of Tesla's "master plans," strategic missives from chief executive Elon Musk, has declined dramatically.

The first held for a decade. The third, just superseded by Master Plan Part IV, did not even make its third birthday.

An optimist, of which Tesla's shareholder ranks have no shortage, might take that as a sign that the future is arriving faster and plans must shift accordingly.

In reality, it is a sign that Tesla has been unable to will its future into being quickly enough and must therefore redefine it again.

The most compelling evidence for this is that Master Plan Part IV is not a plan.

Generously, and borrowing a favourite phrase of one of Mr Musk's more prominent frenemies, it might be described as a concept of a plan.

Far from laying out a blueprint for tomorrow, it offers nostalgia for yesteryear and the sort of vague futurism you might plausibly conjure up on artificial-intelligence chatbot Grok with a spare half-hour. (It was actually published on X, Mr Musk's social media platform, rather than Tesla's website.)

The first master plan read more like one, outlining a standard bootstrapping strategy of building an expensive electric vehicle (EV), then using the money from that to make a cheaper one to grow the market and so on.

Tesla mostly delivered on that, although its claim in the latest version that it leveraged profits from early models to build new ones rather overlooks the lack of profits and reliance instead on accommodating capital markets through the 2010s.