Elon Musk apparently got “Joy to the World” stuck in his head and decided to change the entire mission of his company because of it. On Christmas Eve, the world’s richest man took to X instead of spending time with his family to declare that he is “changing the Tesla mission wording from: Sustainable Abundance To Amazing Abundance,” explaining, “The latter is more joyful.”
Business Insider suggested that Musk is referencing Tesla’s “master plan” document, which the company published in its fourth edition earlier this year. There are multiple references to “sustainable abundance” within that document, though it never really defines what that means. The closest it comes is calling the company’s efforts to combine “our manufacturing capabilities with our autonomous prowess to deliver new products and services that will accelerate global prosperity and human thriving driven by economic growth shared by all” a form of sustainable abundance, which… almost means something.
Musk took heat at the time for the document being vague and providing no real details or plans for how the company would achieve its goals. Shortly after it dropped, YouTuber Dave Lee (who has “TSLA investor since 2012” in his X bio) posted “The real master plan ought to have more specifics,” which got Musk to reply, “Fair enough. Will add more specifics.” It’s not clear if changing “sustainable” to an even vaguer “Amazing” accomplishes that.
Beyond just changing one undefined term to a nonsensical phrase, Musk’s decision to ditch “sustainable” is another marker of how far he’s strayed from his past positions on climate change. In 2017, Musk left his role as an advisor to the first Trump presidency over the administration’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, stating, “Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.” The same year, he told Rolling Stone, “Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI.” Just a year later, Musk positioned himself and his company as the solution, insisting, “Tesla cannot die,” because “The fundamental purpose, the fundamental good that Tesla provides, is accelerating the advent of sustainable transport and energy production.”
Looks like all that is out the window. Now Musk is boosting AI as the future and claiming climate change actually isn’t that big of a deal. Last year, Musk said, “We still have quite a bit of time” to address climate change, and “we don’t need to rush” to solve it. He also claimed that things won’t get really bad for humans until CO2 reaches levels of about 1,000 parts per million in the Earth’s atmosphere, because that would start to cause people to experience “headaches and nausea.” That’d be more than double our current CO2 levels, which are already leading to a significant uptick in extreme weather events that have displaced and killed people.
About 50 million years ago, CO2 levels may have reached 1000 ppm, and the global average temperature was probably about 10°C warmer than today. Under those conditions, Earth had little ice, and the sea level was at least 60 meters higher than current levels, per the Royal Society of London. That’s a lot of flooded roads, a bit hard to drive on with your “amazing” vehicle. But this is about where things stand for us. The richest man in the world, even as he is making the most outlandish and unrealistic promises, the best he can do is say, “We said the future would be amazing, we didn’t say it would be sustainable.” Sounds about right.
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