The Key To Elon Musk's Master Plan Part 3!

Elon Musk has a secret master plan. Well, maybe not so secret, it is out there for everyone to see, we’re just not supposed to talk about it. We’ve just broken the first rule of Master Plan Club. But that’s fine, because the REAL secret has yet to be revealed. Elon Musk has already shown us part one of his master plan in 2006, then he released part deux in 2016, but it’s part trois where the real mystery lies.

The world is a very different place now than it was in 2016, and Elon Musk now has a very different role to play in that world. The Elon of 2016 had no idea what was ahead of him, years of Model 3 production hell, sleeping on the factory floor, losing massive amounts of money, the constant threat of bankruptcy and his “on again - off again” relationship with now infamous bed pooper, Amber Heard… Only to come out the other end as the richest human being on the planet by far, the owner and operator of a handful of extremely successful companies, a household name around the world and the soon-to-be owner of Twitter dot com.

The man lived 5 lifetimes in those 6 years, so it’s no surprise that he’s already eager for a new chapter in his famous master plan. But what does the future hold for Elon Musk and his empire of tech companies? Because one of the few things that we know for sure is that Master Plan Part 3 will be more than just a Tesla blueprint, it will also reference SpaceX and the Boring Company. We can’t claim to know for sure what’s going on in this dude’s head, but we can make some very strong assumptions on where things are going. So let’s talk about the future of the Musk-Verse.

Master Plan: Tesla

We can start off with Tesla, because this is probably going to be the section that is the most dense and the least speculative. We’ve already at least gotten a peak at pretty much everything that Tesla is going to be up to over the next 10 years.

Elon said in a tweet that the main goals for Tesla will be scaling to extreme size, which is needed to shift humanity away from fossil fuels, and towards artificial intelligence.

Scaling to extreme size was one of the key notes of Elon’s Cyber Rodeo presentation at Giga Texas, a building that he referred to as, “The most advanced car factory that the Earth has ever seen.” The GigaFactory is going to be the backbone of this scaling effort, Austin, Berlin, Shanghai and even the old Fremont California plant - which has recently been reported as running as much as 20% above its previous capacity in an effort to make up for lost productivity at Shanghai. 

And this is just the beginning. Giga Shanghai will be joined by a second factory in the same location that will bring an additional half million vehicle production capacity. And before the end of this year we should find out about at least one more GigaFactory location, maybe Indonesia, maybe India… We can talk more about that in a separate video.

At Giga Texas, Elon said that Tesla is growing at the fastest pace of any large manufacturing company in the history of the world. But even so, they only account for about 1% of all cars sold worldwide. Elon says the goal long term would be to reach around 20% of the global vehicle market. And that means that the company needs to continue to grow at this pace, consistently for years on end, there will be constant acceleration in production capacity.

Then there’s artificial intelligence, which basically translates into automation. Fully autonomous vehicles that can drive themselves with no need for human intervention. Autonomous, humanoid Tesla Bots that can substitute for human labor in jobs that are dangerous, boring and repetitive.

Elon says that the key to automation is solving real world AI. Right now, they’re tackling that problem by trying to teach a car how to drive in the same way that a person learns how to drive. Our roadways and traffic systems aren’t built for lidar measurements and digital maps. People navigate the world with just our eyes, our brains and our instincts - some better than others. And for Tesla to design a car that can be truly autonomous in all real world driving conditions, then it needs to operate under the same parameters - just swap out eyes for digital cameras, swap the brain for a computer and substitute years of driving experience with billions of labeled video clips that are fed into an AI neural network. Think of Tesla's FSD Beta program like driver’s Ed for artificial intelligence.

And the exact same technology can then be turned and implemented into the humanoid robot. Except this time, the system architecture is already there, we just have to change the parameters. So instead of sending the Tesla Bot to drivers Ed, we could send it to McDonald’s Hamburger University. Or wherever else. Window Washer Academy - I don’t think that’s real, but you get the idea. What I really don't know is how Tesla is going to accomplish the labeling and machine learning for these human tasks, like, would the window washer have to wear cameras on their head at work and carry around an FSD computer with them to read and transmit data all day?  - I’m sure someone much smarter than me is looking into it.

So, we know that this is AI related stuff that Tesla can already do, more or less, they just need to perfect the art. So I think Master Plan Part 3 is going to expand on the real implications for this technology once it is up and running.

For example, a self-driving car can just be a fun toy for wealthy people to own, that’s what it is now and will be for the near future. This is basically what Elon laid out in his second Master Plan - “Point three: Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning. Point 4: Enable your car to make money for you when you aren’t using it.”

So what does the evolution of that idea look like? What’s the next step? I still think that in the long term, we reach a point where Tesla stops selling cars. They’re still producing cars, tens of millions of them, or at least something that we might vaguely recognize as a car - some kind of futuristic, automated ‘people mover’ thing. So the car becomes a service that you use, as opposed to a product that you buy. 

Because when a car is truly, fully self driving and accessible to everyone, then does it really matter anymore? As car drivers, we develop a weird attachment to our vehicles, they become a part of our identity, we all want a cool car so people can see us driving around in it. And that fuels this insane consumerism, where we’re constantly bombarded from all angles with this car advertising, it’s everywhere, always telling us that we need a new car with the new features, the car you have sucks, you should throw it in the garbage and you need to buy a new one right now. It’s pretty screwed up. And it’s definitely not sustainable from a resource and environmental perspective. Obviously we don’t actually throw cars in the garbage, we recycle them, but even in the best case scenario, one quarter of the vehicle still ends up in a landfill.

So, if we’re really going to save the world, then we need to decouple vehicles and consumerism. And we do that with automation. A robo taxi would meet all of your transportation needs, without any of the hassles and costs that come along with owning a vehicle. And since Tesla themselves build, own and operate the entire robo taxi fleet, the cost would be unbelievably low per ride.

And then I think another major aspect of Elon’s Master Plan Part 3 that he hasn’t mentioned yet will be energy. This is definitely a big part of “scaling to extreme size”, he means both vehicle production and battery production. But Tesla’s Energy division is going to be huge in the next phase of the company.

If we go back to Elon’s original plan in 2006, he kept it pretty simple: “Build a sports car. Use that money to build an affordable car. Use that money to build an even more affordable car. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options.”

I think the evolution of that idea is something along the lines of, ‘build the world's largest automotive company, use that money to build the world’s largest energy company.”

I remember once hearing a former Tesla employee say that Elon wasn’t trying to be the next General Motors, he was trying to be the next General Electric - a company that powers the world. And that’s definitely something that is within reach. In a world of sustainable energy, Tesla has very little competition - the solar roof, the Powerwall, the Powerpack, Megapack - there isn’t really any other company with a product lineup like this. And just like with Tesla’s vehicle production, energy is still in the early days, things are about to scale up drastically. Elon has talked about growing Megapack deployments by ten fold in just 5 years from now.

Elon recently said that to transition everyone and everything in the world to sustainable energy, a zero carbon global economy, we would need no less than 300 terawatt hours of battery cell production - that’s about 1000x more batteries than what currently exists on the planet Earth. And much like with vehicles, Elon isn’t saying that Tesla can do it all, but he says that they can probably account for up to 20% of global battery output at that 300 terawatt hour scale. So, 60 terawatt hours, that’s 60 thousand gigawatt hours… The current battery cell output at Giga Nevada is probably around 40 Gigawatt hours per year. So we would need 1,500 GigaFactories running at their current output to make that happen in a year.

There’s obviously a huge gap that needs to be filled here. And Elon Musk seems to be the only person talking about it. So…

Master Plan: SpaceX

This one is a little more simple in scope, but vastly more difficult in execution. We all know the plan for SpaceX, to build a self-sustaining city on the planet Mars and make human life multiplanetary - to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.

If we were to map out the plan for SpaceX the way that Elon mapped out Tesla, it would be something like, “Build a reusable rocket booster to launch people and payloads into orbit. Use that money to build a massive constellation of satellites that deliver high speed internet to all parts of the Earth. Use that money to build a fully reusable, two stage, super heavy lift rocket. Use the big ass rocket as an interplanetary transport vehicle to move massive amounts of people and payloads to the Moon and Mars.”

Easy, right? Fortunately they don’t need to build rockets on the same scale as Tesla’s, it’s just that the engineering side is a little more difficult and a lot more dangerous.

But if we want to find an obvious connection between Tesla and SpaceX, it comes back to automation. Regardless of what Elon says, we aren’t sending human beings to Mars any time soon. First things first, we have to send a ton of robots there to get some infrastructure built up and prove that all of this stuff really works. Prove that it’s safe. Or as safe as possible given the circumstances of landing on an alien planet. So Tesla's robotics and artificial intelligence is going to be key to establishing that presence on Mars, and probably even the Moon as well. These environments are far too harsh for human beings to deal with on our own, we need robot help, and the smarter those robots are, the better.

Master Plan: Boring Company

Up until a couple of days ago, I wasn’t really sure how the Boring Company fit in with the grand vision of the future - it’s Teslas in tunnels, it looks very convenient in certain circumstances, but nothing to get crazy excited about. Until the hyperloop idea came roaring back.

Both Elon Musk and the official Boring Company Twitter account have confirmed that they are developing a hyperloop as we speak - and The Boring Company says that a full scale test will happen at some point this year.

A Hyperloop is like a regular Boring Company Loop on steroids - it’s not just a regular tunnel, this system uses a vacuum tube, so there is zero air inside the tube, it’s an empty void, just like outer space. And that means the vehicle traveling through the tube will not encounter any resistance - there is no such thing as aerodynamics in a hyperloop because there is no air. That allows for super fast transit speeds. In theory, the maximum speed of the hyperloop should be nearly 800 miles per hour - that’s 3.5x faster than Japan’s bullet trains, it’s even faster than a 747 jet plane. It’s LA to San Francisco in 45 minutes with no need for takeoff or landing.

Hyperloop can put an end to short duration airplane flights, especially in North America, which are currently the only way that we have to travel a long distance in a short time. And that sucks because airplanes create a gigantic amount of pollution, they’re a terrible thing to use unless you have to cross the ocean. Our railway system on this continent is slow as piss AND expensive. It’s a joke. High speed rail would be great, but hyperloop is better.

So, I see the Boring Company plan coming out with two main priorities - The Vegas style, Tesla loops for local transit solutions in major cities. And then Hyperloops for interstate travel. New York City to DC could be a start, but eventually New York to LA with no need for an airplane.