Elon Musk's Master Plan for Tesla

Last week, Tesla Motors dropped “motors” from its name, and is now calling itself just Tesla. This is an indication that the electric car company is thinking about much more than cars. And Elon Musk went way beyond indicating a shift – he explicitly spelled it out in his new master plan, published last Thursday. His first master plan, published in 2006, described the company we know today: build an expensive electric car, improve manufacturing, build a less expensive car, grow manufacturing, and finally build a mass market EV. While Tesla hasn’t always hit Musk’s ambitious timeframes, it is on a path to achieving his original vision. Part two is much more ambitious. It includes building a seamless solar-plus-storage offering, dominating grid-scale storage, revolutionizing busses and tractor trailers, and making shared fleets of autonomous vehicles available to all. As Musk described in his post: “Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared.” So is his latest plan idiocy cubed? Or the right amount of Muskian ambition at just the right time? In this week's podcast, we dissect the plan. Then, we'll discuss energy in campaign politics. We’ll look at Hillary Clinton’s pick of Tim Kaine for vice president, and examine Donald Trump’s relationship with fracking tycoon Harold Hamm. Finally, we’ll take the pulse of regulators, who debated how to grapple with distributed resources at a big meeting this week.