Elon Musk Has Changed His Mission Statement

Is Tesla a car company or a robotics company? Are we going to Mars or the Moon? Are humans part of extending the “light of consciousness” to other planets? It can be hard to keep up if you’ve followed Elon Musk’s shifting mission statements over the past decade, or even the past year, or just the past month.

“We’ve updated the Tesla mission to amazing abundance. And this is intended to send a message of optimism about the future,” Musk said last month during a call with Tesla investors. “I think we’re most likely headed to an exciting, amazing era of abundance. And I think with the advent, or with the continued growth of AI and robotics, I think we actually are headed to a future of universal high income, not universal basic income but universal high income. I mean, there’s going to be a lot of change along the way, but that is what I see as the most likely outcome.”

The switch to “amazing abundance” is actually a very new change compared to the last mission statement, released in Sept. 2025. Tesla Master Plan Part 4 called it “sustainable abundance,” a nod to Musk’s purported goal of helping the environment.

Compare these latest iterations with Tesla’s old mission statement, and you might feel like it’s a completely different company. By extension, it might seem like Elon Musk was a completely different person. At least on paper and in the way he presents himself to the world.

Here’s how Tesla was talking about itself in 2019: “Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” The rest of the mission statement from that era refers to climate change reaching “alarming levels” and cites statistics about emissions. Tesla was going to bring about a better environment and build a better world.

Even the way that Tesla was talking about how it treats employees feels alien to anyone who knows Musk’s broader mission today:

Along the way, we’re building a culture that is safe, fair and exciting for all of our employees. It is incredibly important to Tesla that everyone looks forward to coming to work every day. We are proud to have built a company filled with employees of all backgrounds who possess the energy and drive to accelerate our vision forward.

A culture that’s safe and fair? Sounds pretty woke, if you ask us. And nothing is more dangerous than the woke mind virus, at least according to Musk.

Musk and humanity

The Tesla mission statement is just one of many that seem to be shifting radically. Musk appeared on the podcast Cheeky Pint last week, where he discussed his plans for his AI chatbot, solar power, and space travel. The discussion around humanity is perhaps the biggest eye-opener for folks who think they understand the billionaire’s goals. Because for all his talk about loving humanity, he transparently loathes people, as evidenced by his decision to take a chainsaw to things like USAID last year. And he seems to be dipping his toe in the water to acknowledge humans aren’t necessary for the future he’s envisioning.

On the podcast, Musk was asked about travel to other planets and how xAI’s Grok fits into that. Specifically, there seemed to be some confusion about whether humans would be part of the equation if artificial intelligence were to surpass human intelligence.

“I mean, the important thing is that consciousness… which I think arguably most consciousness, or most intelligence certainly, consciousness is more of a debatable thing. The vast majority of intelligence in the future will be AI,” Musk said.

“Basically, humans will be a very tiny percentage of all intelligence in the future if current trends continue,” Musk explained. He then stammered through a sentence you’d be forgiven for missing, because it’s borderline unintelligible: “As long as, I think, there’s intelligence, ideally, also, which includes human intelligence and consciousness, propagated into the future, that’s a good thing.”

That word “ideally” seems to be the big red flag for anyone worried about Musk’s plan for humanity. Humans will be there, ideally. But that’s not a guarantee. The host pressed him on the goals of SpaceX and whether AI was a hedge against humanity dying off, or whether it mattered at all.

“I mean, I’m very pro-human. So I want to make sure we take certain actions that ensure that humans are along for the ride, we’re at least there,” said Musk. “But let me just say the total amount of intelligence, I think maybe in five or six years, AI will exceed the sum of all human intelligence. And then if that continues, at some point, human intelligence will be less than 1% of all intelligence.”

The host asked if a small number of humans would still be in control of the AI. Musk then seemed to admit that humanity wouldn’t really be in control of this version of the future.

“In the long run, I think it’s difficult to imagine that if humans have, say, 1% of the… combined intelligence of artificial intelligence that humans will be in charge of AI,” said Musk. “I think what we can do is make sure that AI has values that cause intelligence to be propagated into the universe. So the reason for xAI’s mission is understand the universe. So that’s actually very important.”

Musk then proposed that an AI would like to keep humans around just out of curiosity.

“I think, actually, also as a corollary, you have humanity also continuing to expand. Because if you’re curious, you’re trying to understand the universe, one thing you’re trying to understand is where will humanity go?” Musk said. “And so I think understanding the universe actually means you would care about propagating humanity into the future. And so that’s why I think our mission statement is profoundly important. To the degree that Grok adheres to that mission statement, I think the future will be very good.”

This doesn’t make any sense, obviously. If some form of robotic intelligence wanted to understand the universe, there’s no reason it would need humans to do it. It’s a bit like believing that a particular species of bug would be treasured and sustained into the future by a race of advanced beings simply because they wanted to understand the universe. It might be a nice thought, but it’s not necessary, especially if the AI saw itself as wildly advanced.

The host asked the question using chimpanzees as an example. Even if humans care about chimps, they’re not trying to expand the footprint of chimps into space. Musk countered that humans have made protective zones for chimps.

“Even though we could, humans could exterminate all chimpanzees, we’ve not, we’ve chosen not to do so,” said Musk.

That may resonate with some folks, but it’s not very encouraging when you consider what Musk is building with his AI chatbot Grok. This is the AI that has spreading far-right conspiracy theories about white farmers being killed in South Africa while advocating for a new Holocaust. Musk spends practically every day talking about how oppressed white people are on X, and who can forget the two Nazi-style salutes he gave at President Donald Trump’s second inauguration?

This is the guy who’s going to build an advanced AI that will cherish humanity and want to see it thrive into the future? One can obviously imagine Grok’s biases because we see them at work each and every day. This is the bot that says Elon Musk is smarter than Einstein and more fit than LeBron James.

Do you want to live in the wildlife refuge run by Grok?

Hyping the stock for Tesla

As the wealthiest person in the history of the world ($850 billion, according to Forbes), Musk seems to be building something not for humanity but for himself. Every pivot we see serves his needs and the needs of the Tesla stock price.

When his electric car sales started to plateau, Musk insisted that Tesla wasn’t a car company; it was a technology company. He argued that his software, like “Full Self-Driving,” made it much more important than a firm that was cranking out electric vehicles. And his robot Optimus was folded into that mix as the great promise of the future, suddenly making Tesla not just a car company, not just a tech company, but a robotics company.

Musk said on his investor call last month that he had a “long-term goal” of producing 1 million Optimus robots per year, discontinuing his Tesla Model S and X vehicle production, and instead building robots in order to make that happen. The call was peppered with caveats, even when it came to his long-promised Full Self-Driving tech, including phrases like “pending regulatory approval.” Musk has been hyping fully autonomous driving as just around the corner for so long that it even has its own Wikipedia page. And he wants investors to think the only thing holding him back is that damn Big Government that’s always so meddlesome.

What is SpaceX’s true mission?

In the near future, it won’t just be the Tesla stock price that needs juicing. Musk has merged his AI company xAI (which also owns the social media platform X) with SpaceX in the lead-up to turning it into a publicly traded company. Merging the two companies doesn’t make much sense, unless you can come up with some strange excuse. And in the case of SpaceX, Musk landed on “AI in space.”

Musk said during the Cheeky Pint podcast that he expects it will soon be cheaper to build artificial intelligence and orbital data centers in space.

“My prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI will be space in 36 months or less, maybe 30… 36 months? Less than 36 months,” said Musk.

The timeline reminds one of the promises for flying cars, which always seem to be two years out. When Musk says 36 months, the equivalent of three years, it’s long enough that he’s banking on the public’s short memory for hype. And by very performatively saying maybe it’s actually 30 months, he’s signalling that he’s got some kind of calendar where he’s being precise.

Should X be “inclusive”?

You see the same kind of radical shifts happen in recent years at X. Compare the way that Musk talked about Twitter when he was trying to buy it in 2022 to the way he operates it today, and anyone would find it hard to reconcile.

“I think it’s very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech,” Musk said during an interview shortly after he announced his intention to buy it. “Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square, so it’s just really important that people have the, both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”

“My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” Musk said.

Needless to say, Musk has tried to censor anyone he doesn’t like on the platform while spreading far-right extremist hate. The word “inclusive” probably hasn’t left Musk’s mouth in the four years since he uttered it about Twitter.

Meanwhile, he seems to have lost interest in running a social media company as he turns his attention to AI and taking SpaceX public.

Mars or the Moon or flying cars?

The shift in focus can give people whiplash. And there was confusion when Musk suddenly made an abrupt change in the goals of SpaceX, writing last week that the company had “shifted focus toward building a self-growing city on the Moon.”

“The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars,” Musk wrote. “That said, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization, and the Moon is faster.”

Again, we see his longer timelines, which may as well be promises about 100 years into the future.

The Tesla CEO keeps saying that the future is going to be so amazing, you won’t even need to work. He insists that robots will be doing everything and humans will get to just sit around and entertain ourselves with whatever we like, while still collecting money somehow. This also makes no sense, but the billionaire has gone so far as to say that money won’t exist in the future and you shouldn’t bother saving for retirement.

Musk appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in Oct. 2025 and teased that he’d be demonstrating a flying car by the end of the year. The billionaire didn’t do that, of course, and there’s nobody really asking why. You don’t even need a full three years for people to forget the promises you made. You can do the same thing in three months, provided you wave enough shiny objects around.

What is the real goal?

Musk has many different ways of presenting himself to investors and the broader world. And he’s obviously out to accumulate as much money as possible, despite claiming he doesn’t do anything for money. We live in an era of men driven by petty grievances.

Musk wasn’t invited to the White House for an electric car event during Joe Biden’s presidency, something that many commentators think drove his push to embrace President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Musk is obsessed with getting ousted from OpenAI, the company he helped found with others like CEO Sam Altman. These rivalries may seem like small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but personal animus toward perceived enemies may be the one big thing driving Musk beyond money. Because after you’re a trillionaire, what more is there to achieve?

What if Musk’s dismantling of USAID and destruction of federal agencies under DOGE was just a way to get back at the Democrats who no longer worshiped him as a god? What if the merger of X, xAI, and SpaceX into one big franken-company IPO is just a way of beating Sam Altman and OpenAI to the finish line?

In early 2025, Musk led an unsolicited bid for OpenAI in a move widely seen as an effort to frustrate the AI company’s transition into a for-profit vehicle. Billionaires like Musk can hoard all the money in the world, but they’re still driven by some of the pettiest motivations you can imagine. And that’s probably why his mission statements keep changing. It’s not in the service of some higher purpose. When it comes right down to it, it’s all about just two things: money and hate.