It’s official. The word “sustainable” is gone from Tesla’s mission statement.
For over a decade, Tesla’s guiding star was arguably the most impactful corporate mission statement of the 21st century. But over the last few years, we have watched the company slowly drift away from its environmental roots.
Now, Elon Musk has confirmed the final step in that divorce, rebranding the company’s goal from “Sustainable Abundance” to simply “Amazing Abundance.”
The evolution of Tesla’s mission statement tells the story of the company’s shifting priorities better than any earnings call could.
Originally, the mission was specific and targeted: “To accelerate the advent of sustainable transport.”
This was the Tesla of the Roadster, the Model S, and the Model 3. The goal was to prove that electric vehicles could be better than gasoline cars and to force the industry to change.
As Tesla acquired SolarCity and expanded into energy storage with Powerwall and Megapack, the mission naturally evolved to be more inclusive: “To accelerate the advent of sustainable energy.”
That was the peak of Tesla’s climate-focused narrative. It was about the ecosystem: solar, storage, and transport working together to decarbonize the grid.
The transition made sense with the original mission as you need transport to be electric in order to be sustainable and powered by renewable energy.
However, in recent years, specifically around the launch of Master Plan Part 3 and the rise of the Optimus bot project, Musk began using the phrase “Sustainable Abundance.” It moved the goalposts from “energy” (a tangible climate metric) to “abundance” (an economic concept driven by automation and AI).
On Christmas Eve, Musk took to X to announce the final mutation of the mission:
“Am changing the Tesla mission wording from: Sustainable Abundance To Amazing Abundance.”
As for why, Musk simply said, “The latter is more joyful.”
Here is the tweet:
By removing “sustainable,” Tesla is signaling that its primary focus is no longer the environment or the climate crisis. “Amazing Abundance” is a reference to the post-scarcity future Musk believes he is building through general-purpose humanoid robots (Optimus) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
In this new mission, electric cars and renewables are just tools to help build this hypothetical utopia.
Electrek’s Take
I hate to say “I told you so,” but I feel entirely vindicated.
Longtime readers know that I made the difficult decision to sell my Tesla shares back in 2024. At the time, I wrote a post explaining that my main reason for selling was my belief that Tesla was moving away from its mission to accelerate the world’s advent of sustainable energy.
I received a lot of hate for that article. They said I didn’t understand the “bigger picture.” I did. I still do. I just don’t believe in it, and I don’t want to be invested in it.
This tweet confirms exactly what I was seeing. The removal of the word “sustainable” isn’t just semantics; it’s a declaration of intent. The company that kickstarted the EV revolution is effectively bored with it. Musk is now chasing a sci-fi fantasy of infinite economic output, and he is doing it in a scary fashion.
Furthermore, Musk’s reasoning that “Amazing Abundance” is “more joyful” rings incredibly hollow when you look at his behavior on his social media platform.
He talks about creating a robot utopia on one hand, but on the other, he spends his days amplifying divisive rhetoric: saying that “white people should reclaim their nations”:
It is jarring to hear about “joy” from a man who is constantly bitching about “white nations going away” and engaging with replacement theory content.
It is scary stuff for anyone who knows history. It feels like he is completing his villain arc.
Just over a week ago, he was telling other billionaires that it is not worth giving your money away because his hypothetical utopia will soon result in “high universal income”:
This nonsense is evil. If you want to talk about universal income, talk about how exactly to implement it.
The idea that people don’t need to “save money” and that charity won’t be needed shows Musk is completely disconnected from reality.
If AI really brings an age of abundance, the only way it turns into “universal high income” is if the billionaires, and likely trillionaires at that point, somehow become charitable, or if the population decides to take it all from them.
What these “age of abundance” proponents never mention is the mechanism for this end to poverty.
If AI generates massive wealth, that capital will initially concentrate in the hands of the billionaires who own the models and the data feeding them. Our data. How does that wealth translate into ‘Universal High Income’? It won’t magically trickle down. We know that by now.
With the political landscape captured by ultra-high-net-worth individuals who consistently block higher taxation, the only path to redistribution is through the very thing Musk is dismissing: charity. Either they give the wealth away or allow their captured political class to raise their own taxes.
Musk’s argument boils down to, ‘There is no need to be generous now; wait until we have accumulated even more wealth, then we will become somehow generous.’ It exposes a fundamental contradiction in the promised ‘age of abundance.’
I am extremely wary of everyone who promotes this without a precise mechanism to transfer the wealth, especially when they are also crying about “white nations going away.”
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