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Let me tell you we have a new star.

A star is born elan On mars Jus and Kennemy.

He is the Thomas Edison plus plus plus of our age.

Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity.

I feel for the guy.

I would say ninety eight percent really appreciate what he does.

But those two percent.

That are nasty, they are opit in full.

Fols.

We were meant for great things in the United States of America, and Elon reminds us of that.

I'm very disappointed in Elon.

I've helped Elon a lot.

Welcome to Elon Aink, Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk.

It's Tuesday, September two.

I'm your host, Max Chafkin, joined right now by Craig Trudell, Bloomberg Autos editor, Hey, Craig AMX, and of course Stana Hall, Bloomberg Elon Musk reporter and the regular contributor to this podcast, Dana.

How are you, hey, Max?

So yesterday was Labor Day.

Normally that's a slow day, I guess slow day for most of people in the United States anyway, But it wasn't slow for Elon, so Tesla unveiled its master Plan Part four.

These were once like a big part of the company's identity, of Elon's identity.

But the weird thing about this fourth master plan was that Elon basically didn't talk about it.

Most of the weekend.

He was tweeting about kind of his usual like political interests.

He was tweeting about the quote rape of Europe, a bunch of other niche topics, birth rates, far right, British politics, supposed voter fraud, groomers, JB.

Pritzker's cousin.

It went on and on and on, many many tweets about all this, and the only mention as far as I could find of the master plan at all was the comment that quote eighty percent of Tesla's value will be optimists.

We'll get to optimists in a second, But Craig, what is your read on this latest master plan?

Yeah, as you alluded to, this has been the big thing in Tesla lore right.

The first one came out in two thousand and six, and it was before Tesla was really even on most people's radar.

It wasn't really a company that was on the tip of anybody's tongue wasn't the world's most valuable car company, and it was kind of endearing.

It's sort of you know, it was fun.

It was the title of it was something about secret master plan between you and me.

It was something that people could enjoy.

It was a little bit unconventional, not like other CEOs.

I think the second one was sort of like that too, right.

They referred to it as master Plan Pardue.

I think we're less jokey with the last iteration.

They tried to do this long winded presentation about all it was going to take to turn the world to sustainable energy.

And I feel like it was right around that time that this was a company that was all about sustainable energy.

To Psyche, it's all about AI, it's all about robots, it's all about self driving cars, and the business that you've known us for since the beginning forget about it.

Where As Dana likes to say, we're tired of we're bored of making cars and this master plan it really underwhelmed me.

It was super vague, had a lot of platitudes, and it was very uninitial master plan like in that it was a lot of empty rhetoric and sort of vague platitudes and not much substance.

Part quatro dana, I mean definitely less specific.

Sustainable abundance is the main theme.

Yes, abundance is like the new buzzword.

And I'm like, are they just trying to like jump on the fact that there's a book out about abundance and like capture the like search engine SEO terms about that.

What struck me is that this is recycling stuff that has been in their shareholder decks and in their impact reports.

They're like even the picture of like the family playing Jiggo, while I guess Optimist is in the background like watering the plants or something like that.

We've seen those images before, and so fundamentally, I think that Tesla has a real marketing problem where you have a CEO who is clearly bored of the car industry, wanting to continue to ride this AI hype wave and convinced shareholders that the future is all about robotics and AI, but like they keep falling short of really being able to do that in a cogent way.

And for a long time it was all about FSD, But now I almost get the sense that Elon is tired of FSD because he's talking more about optimists.

If optimist is going to be eighty percent of the value, then what is the value of FFSD?

Like he's constantly reinventing ways for Tesla to differentiate itself.

Meanwhile, as Craig knows, like they've got four factories around the globe that are over capacity and declining sales, Like what are they going to do with these auto plants that they built in Berlin?

In places like Berlin?

I just think it's like, why drop this on labor Day?

Unlet It's the proxy is gonna come out soon.

But it's just like from from everything, from like a timing perspective and a marketing perspective and a strategic communications perspective.

It's the mess that Tesla has always been.

I want to get to this sort of marketing question in a minute.

But like Craig on this optimist thing, Elon's own, like I said, his only comment about this, and in years past, right the part uno or part uh and part duh were very personal documents.

I mean, Part uh was basically a blog post.

Uh.

Part two was a blog post.

Part three was this crazy white paper.

But even there, Elon spent a lot of time tweeting about it, and I went back and looked and he was promoting it on the day it dropped.

He was talking about he's talking about writing it eighty percent of Tesla's valuable optimist, Craig, do you know what that actually means?

Like, is that is there a deadline on that?

Or like, at what point is optimists eighty percent?

Any sense of how investors should should model this one?

Yeah, my inbox has been interesting.

We have a lot of investors that tend to like to message authors of stories about Tesla, as you might imagine, and most of them, yeah, have been very thumbs down and sort of bronx cheers in terms of this, you know, and they're pretty consistent, right of, like how long is this guy going to keep up the stick of trying to cover for the fact that his car business is not growing and not even really do so in an incredible way, because you know, these robots make for cool hype videos, they make for maybe being fun at parties, although we've seen that they've needed remote support in order to do simple things like serve drinks.

Like, we have no idea when exactly these robots are actually going to be as Musk would say, doing something useful, and until and unless we have a clear indication of what sort of glidepath we are on toward that, how can you possibly come up with a credible sort of line about how much value this product is going to be for this company in the next few years.

I'm also just like stignied by the ever changing mission of the company.

So first it was to celebrate the advent of sustainable transportation that it was widened to be sustainable energy, and we saw products like the solar roof and the power wall and the megapac, which are real products and actually like a pretty actually are like a growth driver of the business at this point.

But now it's sustainable abundance.

And it's like what does abundance mean?

Am I supposed to think that?

Like if Optimists can water my garden, that's somehow abundant for me?

Like I actually enjoy watering my garden.

Like what I don't understand?

Like what is what is abundance supposed to mean?

Is it time?

Is it wealth?

Is it like freedom from mundane tasks?

Like if you look at these shareholder decks, like Optimist is pushing a baby carriage, and is that the product that Elon is now most excited about because it certainly sounds like it based on his post sun X.

Yeah, I mean, I think just to maybe I'm reading too much into this.

I mean, I think it's the idea that these optimi will eventually staff factories and be much less expensive than human workers, and therefore our stuff will get much, much much cheaper.

It's the kind of like utopian like Sam Altman.

I mean, obviously Elon and Sam Altman have their differences, but like the kind of techno utopian idea of AI.

I mean, that's that's my reading of it.

But like to your point and to Craig's point, optimists, according to this very short master plan, is quote changing not only the perception of labor itself, but it's availability and capability.

So maybe it sound like optimist is already put to work.

There are these pictures that Dana mentions in this in this thing.

One is an optimize, an optimist working in a factory.

It looks like with some little chemical vials.

There's also a very nice one of a of a like kind of a high end party scene where the optimist is serving drinks.

Another one where the optimist is watering the plants.

Well, I guess the family plays Jenga some really you know, pastoral scenes.

But like, is optimists even in the Tesla Cafe still remember we had those videos where it was making popcorn.

Are we seeing more Optimists out in the world.

Do we have any sense of actual progress here?

I think Musk was asked about this and has been asked about this the last couple of earnings calls, and he's been really sort of reluctant to give firm timelines.

And I think my favorite on the last earnings call was, you know, it's really hard to talk about the beginning of an S curve, but you know it's much easier for me to say five years from now, there's gonna be these really big numbers of these things to talk about, and that you know, it's just gonna go like Gangbusters, but actually pin down on but when exactly are we going to see these being sold to customers outside of Tesla and not just use by your own employees And he won't really say.

I think the closest he got to that was back in January, where he said maybe second half of next year for him to be again talking about.

Shan elon time could mean anything from second half of next year to second half of next decades.

It's so ironic for him to say, Oh, it's easier for me to talk about five years out from now and harder about the nearer term, when even his super fans make jokes at his expense about whenever he says two weeks be skeptical about something actually being ready two weeks from now.

Dana, what is happening with Tesla's auto sales?

There have been a couple of bad quarters.

I know that there are bulls who are sort of hoping that the anxiety over the ev tax credits going away as a result of the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill will lead to sort of spike in sales.

Is there any sense that like things are going to turn around in terms of car sales in the near term.

Tesla operates basically in three markets in North America, Europe, and China.

And in North America sales have been down quarter over quarter, mostly because of the backlash to Elon, and I do think that the third quarter will see a bump because people are trying to get ahead of these tax credits that sunset on September thirtieth.

But in Europe, as Craig knows, sales have really cratered in like all the key markets, and then in China there's this growing competition from BYD and so you're seeing Tesla now push into new markets, like the cyber truck is going to be available in South Korea, and like they started selling cars in Turkey and they've got six hundred cars.

I think they've sold in India.

So like the only thing that they can do is expand the map because their core map is cratering.

And that's just hard to do because it means like growing in new markets is not as easy as sustained markets where you were once the market leader.

And that's that's what's so I think crazy making to all of the like longtime Tesla investors and early employees who just remember like how hard it was to make the Model three and to like get production at scale and then they made like the best selling car in the world, and Elon is throwing it out like he's he has not done anything personally to really market the new model.

Why we've heard nothing about the cyber truck.

I mean, I've written about this before, but I think fundamentally this is a person who wants to be in the arena where everyone else is focused.

I think in his mind, he solved the problem of making an affordable, high quality electric car, and he's bored and he's moved on, and like the fact is that like tens of thousands of employees and all of these factories in this entire global supply chain have not and so how are they gonna Like it's selling the cars, is what is going to fund projects like optimists?

Well that's what's crazy about this document.

I mean, it doesn't mention affordability really at all.

It suggests that Optimists will make things cheaper by the I think by the mechanism that I've suggested, But there's no talk of like the cost per mile, like any of these things that like we've seen Elon talk about where you could squint and see how automation and the old mission connected to one another.

That was sort of the point, if I memory serves of Part DUA.

The crazy thing is that the third one, which I went back and scanned, I didn't reread the whole thing because it's like thirty pages.

Yeah, it's like a weird document from another time, because it's entirely about clean energy and it's like much like a yeah Biden era, like we're gonna get solar.

And it's just wild to think that the guy who created that would then turn around the next year and endorse and then and then do all this stuff to hell a candidate who is like really committed, as we've seen, to dialing all that stuff, back to getting rid of solar installations, getting rid of wind farms, getting rid of these tax credits that have been very good to Tesla?

What about the robotaxi rollout?

So, like you have the car sales going down, there have been over the last couple of weeks a few little developments in robotaxis.

Craig I think Tesla has repeatedly increased the area under which these taxis operate in Austin.

They also said that the availability of robotaxis would increase by fifty percent.

I guess we could take that to mean that there are now fifteen robotaxis in Austin instead of ten.

But like, where do you think this is going?

Do you think we're going to see a bunch of a bunch more cities in the coming months.

It almost feels like he's going to have to do something like that.

To avoid even more investor backlash.

Yeah, I think he was a to be moderately successful, I would say, in getting cars onto the road, at least, even if it was with employees in the passenger seat, even if it was with super fans in the backseat, trying to sugarcoat every sort of issue that they had or problem that they captured as they intestantly filmed on their phones, because it did still generate the buzz that was needed for the sort of Tesla bubble on X and sometimes that is enough.

And I think we then saw the company try to kind of replicate that in San Francisco.

As we know and we're able to see well in advance, that's not going to be doable because of the regulatory regime there, and so they don't actually have cars without people behind the wheel there.

They're doing this token indication that they're growing in Austin before they increase the area where these cars can run around.

You already were having people trying to use the service who we're finding really long wait times because there's not that many cars available and not a huge user base, not many cars on the road.

That makes this you know, sort of headline indication that they're growing in terms of the service area meaningless, right, You're not actually seeing a business yet for Tesla any time soon, and this is really continues to be a stunt.

Yeah, I mean, in my opinion, it's all meaningless just because I mean, these are not driverless cars.

We don't know anything about the economics.

If I'm an investor, like I don't know what to think about any of this.

Like clearly we've seen from other companies it's possible to create something that looks like a driverless car service, like Cruz has done it, Waimo has done it.

Tesla is doing it, but not quite so I don't know, but I do want to try to theory on you both that I've been thinking about as I was digesting all this, which is that what we're seeing is sort of a quiet rebrand that Tesla is doing.

And I don't know if it's happening because of Elon or despite Elon, but I think it has two components.

One of them is the one that Dana just mentioned, which is that sustainability is out, abundance is in right, Like he's not going to talk about sustainability, and that kind of makes sense because we're in a different political climate and everyone is into AI, including investors.

But I think the other one, and this one to me is more subtle, is that Elon is going to be less of a factor in the Tesla brand.

They're you know, recent episode of jay Leno's Car podcast I think it's called jay Leno's Garage featured two Tesla executives not named Elon, Lars Moravi and Franz von Holhausen talking about the company and even this un bylined marketing document that Elon is not talking about.

It feels like there's a little bit of an effort, maybe even a deliberate effort underway to untangle you On from the kind of like future of Tesla.

Am I just seeing things or is that is that real?

Do you think?

I think that the two are so intertwined.

It's like I can't think of another auto executive more intertwined with the brand than like you have to go back to like Leiahcoca and Chrysler to find someone else who is like such a pitchman for the company.

And that has always been the sort of problem with Tesla is that they don't really have a marketing team.

They have influencers, but like Elon has always been the public face of the brand and the only person who can speak for the company until recently, and to your point, like now they are putting more executives out there, but like Elon will forever be tied to Tesla, which is why so many people who are upset about Trump being elected are A will never buy a Tesla and B will never step foot in a ROBOTAXI.

Like that's the other thing, Like how do you grow a ride hailing service where the same people who like have stickers on their car or are like selling their cars, like they're never gonna set foot in these vehicles.

Like it's He's been the CEO of this company since two thousand and eight.

He's like the longest tenured CEO Obeedny automaker currently.

I don't think you can decouple it like that easily.

It's like cemented in people's minds.

Forever, you know.

I think there may be something to this theory, and not necessarily by design, because if anyone were to come to Elon and say, hey, Elon, you know the problem.

We have is you're just a little too close.

To the company.

People associate you with our cars a little bit too much.

Maybe we should back on down from that they'd be thrown out.

You know.

Maybe there's someone very smartly behind the scenes in some dark rooms at Tesla Austin who've drawn this up.

But I think to Danna's point, they're going to have a really hard time actually executing it.

If that's the case.

It just felt like, especially this weekend, Elon and Tesla were pushing in two different directions.

He was tweeting about the AfD.

He was tweeting about far right UK issues.

Tommy Robinson, this extremely divisive figure in British politics.

You know, he's backing this far right political party in the UK.

Tesla's sales in Europe have been really bad, and so it's like it's like, on one hand, Tesla is attempting to kind of reset the narrative.

On the other hand, he law Musk is out there just doing his poster thing, just posting about the most divisive stuff he could think of.

He is now getting behind a party that is to the right of Nigel Farage right, a party that thinks that Farage is soft on immigration.

To give people a sense of this is like, I don't know if in the it's a US equivalent of trying to find someone who thinks that Stephen Miller is too soft on immigrants, right, And it is so incessant that his posting about the UK, and before that it was all sorts of posting about groc Imagine and you know what.

Age we talked about last week.

I mean, I say porn companion, the barely legal right right right, sensual companion that his company created.

Yeah, and just getting this guy to post at all about Tesla, it seems to be a chore.

He'll repost this master plan, he'll comment on somebody who was a little bit confused about Okay, so what are exactly the next steps of executing this master plan?

And that's where we get his you know, eighty percent value posts.

These absolutely are just quick little divergences from the culture wars and his chatbot.

All right, before we go, I just want to bring up one last thing with you guys, And this is going very deep in the kind of Elon universe, the Tesla universe.

But a bunch of fanboys noticed a new potential new Tesla vehicle.

Now I don't think Tesla has given people any reason to think this is real, but in a video that was released of the Tesla design studio.

In the very background you could see what looked like perhaps Dana a cyber truck suv, like an suv version of the cyber truck.

And I think the base for this feels very very thin, But like it hasn't stopped a bunch of like fan sites from writing articles about it with like little red circles around the relevant portion of the video, leaving aside whether it's real or whether it's not.

And I think the answer is that it is not real because Elon Musk has said over and over again that like autonomy is the only thing like there's been actually no signaling about this.

Plus like it really seems like the steel architecture of the cyber truck didn't really work.

But do you think a cyber suv would be a hit on the streets of the United States of America or even in South Korea?

There has always been this question, like is Tesla gonna make a different kind of truck?

Would they ever make like a normal pickup truck, like a F one point fifty, or would they try to tweak the cyber truck to be less expensive in some way?

And I saw Lawyer's Mavi speak in the Bay Area a couple months ago, and he was sort of like vague about it, like they're always thinking of things.

But to be clear, the cyber truck was a complete flop, like that they is not selling.

It is wildly expensive.

It is like the poster child for Elon and politics.

It has a niche audience, but it is nowhere on the S curve.

And so the fact that they would make like an suv version of a failing product doesn't really make sense to me because the cyber truck itself has not been successful.

So I mean, I guess you could make a cyber truck suv, but I don't know what the market would be for that.

The bottle why is really popular, that's their best selling car.

I don't know.

And then you look if you look at the as your plan.

You know, they've talked in the past about making the Robovan, So who knows.

Is it Robovan or Rebovin.

I don't think knows.

Max.

Yeah, yeah, this to me felt like, you know, it's very Taylor Swiftian.

The Swifties talk about Easter eggs and her videos and lyrics and stuff.

This was a total Easter egg for the Tesla audience to you know, very clearly, slip in a little something from the design studio to get everybody excited, and we'll see if it ever actually leaves that studio.

You're probably right, Craig is like, I don't know, you put something in the background of a video, people are gonna see it.

But yeah, very strange.

Also like the typical buyer of a three row suv, like, I'm not sure that really fits with this sort of cyber truck.

Like if you you know, whatever it is, whatever the cyber truck thing is, it feels like pretty far from the kid houler.

The cyber truck is like a tank for the apocalypse, and an suv is like you want to drive the carpool to soccer, So.

I don't tell me, you know, the divorced dad's got his kids like every other weekend or whatever, he's got to take take around somehow.

I guess like that's a possible.

I think Jeep is gonna be okay.

I think is we're arriving at it is our conclusion here, all right, Dana Hall, thank.

You for being here.

Always a pleasure.

Greg, thank you, thanks for having me.

This episode was produced by Stacy Wong and edited by Ana Maazarakis, Blake Maple's Handles Engineering, and Dave Purcell fact checks.

Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson.

The Elnink theme is written and performed by Taka Yazusawa and Alex Sagiera.

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I'm Max Chapkin.

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