Elon Musk took a break from making crass jokes on Twitter and attacking “woke” culture on Wednesday and, in a calm, soft-spoken manner, delivered a hopeful vision for saving the environment.
“What we’re trying to convey is a message of hope and optimism,” Musk, the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla, said on stage at the company’s annual investor day in Austin. “I really wanted today to be not just about Tesla investors who own stock, but really anyone who is an investor in Earth,” Musk said.
Musk then shared his vision for “Master Plan 3,” the latest version of the company’s strategic priorities in its quest to attain a future of sustainable energy for everything from automobiles to factories.
“The thing that I think we wanted to convey probably, more importantly than anything else that we’re talking about here, is that there is a clear path to a sustainable-energy Earth,” Musk said. “It doesn’t require destroying natural habitats. It doesn’t require us to be austere and stop using electricity and sort of be in the cold or anything.”
Musk spoke with a calm and restrained demeanor that stood in contrast to his oftentimes snarky online persona, which has exasperated and alienated many of the progressive-minded consumers who once viewed him as their champion.
The world’s richest person, Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and is currently serving as its CEO, as well as running SpaceX and the Boring Company. But Musk’s chaotic stewardship of Twitter, including laying off roughly three-quarters of the staff and reinstating banned users, has dented his image as an astute entrepreneur.
Wednesday’s Tesla event featured updates on the company’s long-awaited Cybertruck, which has seen multiple delays but is promised to make a debut this year, as well as on plans for autonomous vehicles. Musk predicted all cars will go fully electric and autonomous someday, comparing a non-autonomous gas-powered car to riding a horse and using a flip phone.
The comments come as federal regulators are scrutinizing Musk’s past claims about Tesla’s self-driving technology and just a few weeks after Tesla recalled more than 360,000 vehicles due to safety concerns with its Full-Self Driving feature. Company executives did not address any of those issues directly, but shared internal metrics that they said demonstrated how much safer Tesla’s self-driving technology was compared to human-driven cars.
Musk also discussed Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, often mocked as a “vaporware” project unlikely to ever come to fruition. The company showed videos of the robots walking around in a house as Musk said that Tesla was far ahead of competitors in developing real-world A.I. Robots, Musk said, are the least understood or appreciated part of Tesla’s work, but “will probably be worth significantly more than the car side of things long-term.”
The idealistic and ambitious vision of the future preached by Musk hinges on adoption and on advances he said are necessary in battery storage, the electric grid, heat pumps, and, of course, electric cars. The price tag for the manufacturing to bring about this sustainable revolution is $10 trillion, Tesla said.
The Tesla event comes shortly after expansion announcements, including an engineering headquarters in Palo Alto and a new plant in northern Mexico.
“Earth can and will move to a sustainable economy, and will do so in your lifetime,” Musk said before stepping off the stage to let other Tesla executives take the mic and present for the next few sessions.
Just a few minutes later, Musk was back online somewhere offstage, tweeting about a U.S. senator’s suspended Twitter account and an NBC news report on Crimea.
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