Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been talking about releasing his ‘Tesla Master Plan Part 4’ for over a year now. It has yet to come, and Tesla has yet to complete the goals in Parts 2 and 3. So I decided to come up with my own Tesla Master Plan.

Now, this post is partly tongue-in-cheek. I’m not delusional. I’m fully aware that this is unlikely to happen, but one can dream. As a long-time fan of Tesla and someone who greatly appreciates the Company’s incredible contributions to accelerating the world’s transition to electric transport and renewable energy, I like to imagine a world where Tesla can return to being something more than just a meme stock for degenerate gamblers to bet on.

Tesla was the world leader in electric vehicles, but now its core business is in evident decline. For the first time in over a decade since achieving volume production, Tesla saw its annual sales decline in 2024.

They declined by only 1%, but now they are on pace to be down more than 10% in 2025, and there is no sign of recovery. That’s happening while EV sales are surging globally. Things are expected to worsen with EVs losing incentives in the US, brand damage impacting sales in Europe, and competition eroding Tesla’s market share in China.

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Tesla’s lineup is becoming stale with only a single new vehicle launched in the last 5 years, the Cybertruck, which turned out to be a commercial flop.

That’s due to CEO Elon Musk, who put Tesla all-in on autonomous driving while putting actual electric vehicle programs on the back burner.

Meanwhile, Musk has been consistently wrong about autonomous driving for years. He has promised that every Tesla vehicle produced since 2016 would be capable of unsupervised self-driving, but he was wrong about it working on the first version of hardware HW2, HW3, and now everything points to things stalling on HW4.

Separately, Musk decided to venture into politics senselessly, propagate misinformation on X, and alienate a large part of Tesla’s customer base in the process.

He gave $300 million to get Donald Trump elected, who then gave him free rein to destroy several government agencies, which happened to be investigating him and his companies, in the name of “unrooting corruption”, which never led to any charges.

Trump and the GOP campaigned on a clear agenda that went directly against Tesla’s mission and Musk helped get them elected nonetheless. He only briefly appeared to come to his senses after being pushed out of the White House last month, but he quickly got back to supporting Trump.

While doing all that, Musk also frequently violated his fiduciary duties to Tesla shareholders by starting an AI startup that competes for AI talent with Tesla and threatening shareholders not to build AI products at Tesla, despite claiming these products were critical to Tesla’s future, if he didn’t gain more control over the company.

Tesla shareholders are actively suing him over these issues.

In short, Tesla’s sales are in free fall and expected to drop even sharply next year after its least affected market, the US, removes incentives on electric vehicles.

CEO Elon Musk appears to have lost his mind and his bet on autonomous driving is simply not paying off while other companies, like Waymo and Baidu, are pulling ahead.

At this rate, Tesla is expected to go back to being a money-losing company next year as it is quickly becoming a niche automaker in Europe, it is being squeezed out of the market in China by competition, and the removal of incentives in the US next year is going to cripple its only somewhat healthy market.

In fact, Tesla is already a money-losing company when excluding regulatory credit sales, which are expected to disappear rapidly over the next few years:

With data indicating that sales are not expected to recover in Q2, Tesla is likely to maintain this clear trend through 2025.

Here are Tesla’s quarterly deliveries in Europe:

They have been steadily declining for the past two years, and while Tesla blamed the sharp drop in Q1 on the Model Y changeover, the Company is expected to perform just as poorly in Q2 based on the latest data.

Musk also recently lied by claiming that every other automaker is doing badly in Europe right now, which is not only false, but all-electric vehicle sales are surging.

The US is Tesla’s only somewhat healthy market, and this is expected to change in 2026 with the removal of the federal tax credit and the phasing out of regulatory credits over the next few years.

Things are about to get worse if nothing changes, and as much as some shareholders want to believe it, autonomous driving is unlikely to save Tesla’s financials anytime soon.

Tesla Master Plan Part 4

1- Fire Elon Musk and the board

This is the most challenging part of the whole plan, and unfortunately, nothing else works without it. Unless maybe it is revealed that Elon Musk was held against his will in a basement somewhere since 2020 and replaced by an evil clone. Unlikely.

I say it’s challenging because Tesla shareholders and the board are the only ones that can make it happen, and they are currently completely disincentivized to do it. That’s because the majority of Tesla’s current valuation (trading at nearly 200 times earnings) is based on Musk’s false promises, hype, and made-up projections about multi-trillion-dollar new ventures.

If they fire him, the stock would revert to trading on fundamentals, which would result in a significant decline. However, those fundamentals would likely improve without Musk and his brand destruction.

I previously referred to this as the Tesla shareholders’ dilemma, and ultimately, it’s Tesla’s biggest challenge right now.

Again, I completely understand that there’s no desire from the shareholder base to do that now due to the short-term impact on Tesla’s valuation. Still, they need to ask themselves: “How long can Tesla maintain this valuation if fundamentals don’t start to recover?”

There’s no sign of recovery; everything suggests that things will worsen soon, and autonomy is unlikely to contribute positively anytime soon.

I know this is the hard part, but I think more shareholders are going to start seeing problems now that ‘Robotaxi’ has been launched, sort of, and it will become clear that Tesla is facing many of the same bottlenecks in scaling as Waymo, which has a significant head start.

At some point, Musk will run out of people who believe that Tesla’s vision-only approach is a magic weapon for scaling autonomy, and those who do see the light on this issue will not return to the cult.

Yes, Tesla’s stock will drop if that happens and Musk is ousted, but the stock will eventually drop regardless if the fundamentals don’t start to recover soon.

The board, which has been protecting Musk and allowed multiple breaches of fiduciary duty, should also be ousted for meaningful change to happen.

Suprinsgly, Tesla has yet to announce its 2025 shareholders meeting, which is the only opportunity for shareholders to vote out board members and attempt to change the leadership at Tesla. Usually, it happens in June or July.

2- Make things right with customers and shareholders

After Musk is gone, this needs to be the first step in regaining customer trust and rebuilding demand.

Tesla needs to offer to reimburse everyone who bought the Full Self-Driving (FSD) package and also make a permanent open offer to transfer FSD to new cars with the latest FSD hardware – even with a discount on top.

The caveat here is that the new “FSD”, or whatever you want to call it, doesn’t come with the promise that it will eventually turn into unsupervised self-driving. This can still be the ambition (on new hardware, as I don’t believe HW4 will ever support level 4 self-driving outside of a geo-fenced area with teleoperation), but it’s not something that owners should be expecting.

Tesla has done a lot of great work in autonomous driving, but it has made promises that it can’t keep and set expectations that have created complacency, which in turn resulted in safety issues.

The company should continue developing ADAS and autonomous driving systems, but it should be way more cautious about setting expectations, and it should be more transparent with its data.

The fact that Tesla never released any FSD data other than its cumulative mileage still shocks me.

I would also like to see Tesla make things right for shareholders by suing Musk and the board for having frequently misled them with outright lies and threats, as previously explained. It would undoubtedly be a lengthy legal battle, but if successful, Tesla could recover billions of dollars that Musk and the board had taken from Tesla.

For context, Musk has made more money from Tesla, about $40 billion, by selling stocks, than Tesla made in net income throughout its entire existence: about $34.5 billion.

As for the board, they pocketed over $1 billion.

3- Buy Redwood Materials and Heron Power with stock deals to regain top talent and expand

Tesla has experienced a significant and ongoing exodus of talent for years, but this trend has accelerated substantially over the last year.

Ultimately, a company is only as good as its people. There’s still top talent at Tesla. Some are Elon loyalists who could be problematic, but others are simply talented employees and engineers who seek the opportunity to work on cutting-edge technology and share Tesla’s mission.

Nonetheless, the talent exodus has had a significant impact, and Tesla’s pace of innovation has dropped significantly.

With Musk gone, Tesla will need new leadership, and it should be easier to hire top talent with the polarizing CEO no longer at the helm.

However, acquisitions or mergers could be considered to speed up the reintegration of top talent.

I think the top targets should be Redwood Materials and Heron Power. It would bring JB Straubel and Drew Baglino, arguably the two most impactful engineers in Tesla’s 21-year history, back into Tesla’s engineering leadership.

Approximately 120 employees of Redwood Materials were former Tesla employees, including many who Straubel handpicked for their notable impact on Tesla.

On a smaller scale and more recently, Baglino did the same with Heron to build new solid-state transformers. He recruited many veteran Tesla engineers, especially in the energy and power electronics departments.

Redwood has also recently launched a new energy storage business, in addition to its battery recycling and battery material manufacturing operations. It has become a direct competitor to Tesla Energy.

Both Redwood and Heron could help push Tesla’s energy business to the next level and keep the company’s only growing division growing.

This can be achieved through all-stock transactions. It wouldn’t cost the company anything, and it would help quickly reshape the shareholder base at Tesla.

4 – Back to the basics: expand the line-up with great and efficient electric vehicles

The EV business is significantly tougher than the energy business for Tesla, particularly in terms of demand and growth.

Musk has been betting everything on autonomous driving, but the result is that the lineup has been neglected, with only a single new vehicle introduced in the last five years: the Cybertruck, which has been a commercial flop.

I don’t claim to have a silver bullet here, nor any groundbreaking solutions, but there are several things the automaker could do to return to growth.

Obviously, I think Musk being out of the equation alone should help with demand. However, I think Tesla’s problem is way bigger: it needs a significant refresh to its lineup.

First off, Tesla execs plead with Musk not to cancel the “$25,000 Tesla” or Model 2, or whatever you want to call it. I think you have to reconsider that vehicle program right away.

I am confident that there could be other EV programs or changes to existing ones that Musk shut down amid his focus on autonomous driving at Tesla. Those should also be reconsidered.

The Cybertruck should either be scrapped in favor of a more traditional-looking all-electric pickup truck or undergo a major update. It has been a commercial flop, but there’s no denying that it garnered a lot of interest at some point. The fact that it was launched with a lot less range and a higher price is the main reason it flopped.

If that can be addressed, perhaps by utilizing different battery cells than Tesla’s own 4680, which fell short of the performance announced at Tesla’s Battery Day in 2020, it should be considered.

I’d also love to see Tesla bring some of the advancements brought to market in the Cybertruck program to other vehicles. For example, the steer-by-wire and 48-volt electronic architecture should already have been introduced in the Model S and Model X.

Tesla’s pace of innovation has slowed significantly in recent years, but the automaker still maintains a lead in efficiency among most of its competitors. I’d love to see Tesla utilize that to cover more automotive segments.

5 – Autonomous vehicles

Autonomous driving should still be a critical priority program at Tesla, but I think it should be revised. Musk backed the entire company into a corner by trashing lidar sensors for years and insisting that vision-only was the best approach.

Before he blocked me and Electrek, he actually told us in DMs that he agreed that high definition radars combined with computer vision would be safer than just vision, but he didn’t believe such a radar existed (May 2021):

When I shared such a radar with him, he ignored the comment. Furthermore, lidar sensors essentially function as high-definition radars, utilizing lasers instead of radio waves. However, combining all of them is even better, as each possesses its own advantages. Radar gathers vast amounts of data in waves, while lidar acts more like a scanner.

Musk has repeatedly and very publicly expressed disdain for lidar sensors and for self-driving companies using the technology. He started criticizing the technology when a single sensor cost several thousand dollars and Tesla was trying to build a hardware suite that would be integrated as standard on all vehicles, even if they didn’t purchase its expensive “Full Self-Driving” package.

However, lidar sensors have now become more affordable, costing only a few hundred dollars. Nevertheless, it appears that Tesla is still committed to a vision-only approach, likely due to its CEO’s very public stance against lidars.

Tesla’s HW5 suite should probably include not only a more powerful computer but also the capacity to include a radar and/or a lidar sensor.

6 -Bring back a PR department

Musk’s decision to dissolve Tesla’s PR department in 2020 was a terrible one, and it should be reversed as soon as possible.

It led to Musk being Tesla’s sole mouthpiece, and we all know how that turned out.

Tesla’s PR department was small for a company of its size and even more so for one receiving such extensive news coverage. Nonetheless, it was still successful in ensuring more accurate coverage on average.

Even in negative articles about Tesla, it would try to get Tesla’s side of the story included. Now, all you have is Musk sometimes denying news articles after the fact, and he has little to no credibility doing so after he denied several news articles that turned out to be true.

With Musk gone, a PR department would also be even more critical in trying to realign Tesla with its original mission to accelerate the advent of electric transportation and renewable energy.

The communications around Tesla’s move should explain how those moves advanced the mission. Since Musk dissolved the department and took over communications, it appears that most communications from Tesla are focused on stock pumping rather than advancing the mission.

Along with a PR department, Tesla should focus more on marketing and even advertising. Lately, Tesla appears to have fallen into the trap of legacy automakers, where electric vehicles compete with other electric vehicles. This is a dumb approach, especially in the US where EV still have an extremely low ~10% penetration rate.

With the vast majority of the market still consisting of ICE vehicles, the focus of electric vehicle markets should be on this market and how to encourage people to transition to electric vehicles.

Electrek’s Take

Again, I’m not delusional. I understand this is all extremely unlikely to happen as Musk has an incredible hold on the Tesla shareholder base, and the stock remains high.

However, shareholders could quickly turn into bagholders if Tesla’s fundamentals don’t start to turn around and the company starts losing money next year.

The primary goal of this post is to demonstrate that there’s a world where Tesla could still thrive after Elon Musk, if there’s ever a desire among shareholders to make that happen.

It wouldn’t be easy. It would require significant reforms at the company and for the company to assume the giant liability that Musk created by promising unsupervised self-driving on millions of vehicles.

I believe it’s the right thing to do and the only way I can envision Tesla regaining significant consumer trust, thereby returning to growth and positively contributing to its original mission once again.

Anything else you can think of that should be included in the plan? Let us know in the comment section below.