Do you know that feeling when you’re thinking of buying something, let’s say a new car, and suddenly, you see them everywhere? Well, I am having that right now, but with company values – which is weird because I have been obsessed with values for over a decade.
On Saturday I was in Westfield Stratford for reasons unknown, and even there, among the mass consumption and restaurants were the words “Our Mission…” followed by what the company wanted to achieve. And to no one’s surprise at all, especially if you’ve read the title – it was Tesla.
The World’s Biggest Purpose-driven Company
Now, let me clear, this sentence will be the only time in this missive that will mention Elon Musk. This is about the company and what it’s doing relating to it’s mission. Nothing more.
Tesla tries to tell a simple story. The mission, repeated so often it has become muscle memory, is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. It is probably the most ambitious purpose statement of any modern company, and by scale alone, it might also be the largest purpose driven organisation on the planet.
But purpose is not what you say. It is what you do when trade-offs appear. And Tesla has been a citizen of the Land of Trade-Offs for a long time now.
So the question is not whether Tesla has a mission. It does. The question is whether it is still meaningfully meeting it, and how we should even begin to judge that.
Purpose does not live in slogans
Tesla’s mission is not subtle. It is not abstract. It is not “be the best version of ourselves”. It is concrete, directional, and measurable. Accelerate the transition. Faster than it would have happened otherwise. In training, I even use it as a good example of how to write a mission – and then I go on to discuss how actions speak louder than words, but… spoilers.
This feeling gives us a starting point. Purpose driven companies are not judged on perfection. They are judged on direction and pace.
So the first real metric is simple. Has Tesla materially sped up the global shift away from fossil fuels?
Yes.
Before Tesla, electric vehicles were compliance products. Small, ugly, apologetic things built to satisfy regulators. Tesla made them desirable. Aspirational. Fast. It embarrassed the rest of the automotive industry into taking electrification seriously. It innovated where it needed to, stole aesthetics where people’s taste demanded. And now every major manufacturer now has an EV roadmap because Tesla made inaction reputationally dangerous.
That is purpose doing work at scale.
Acceleration creates collateral damage
Purpose gets harder when you grow. The larger the system, the more compromises, and the stronger the outside influences like shareholders and governments are the more you feel forced to make compromises. Supply chains stretch. Labour practices come under scrutiny. Environmental gains in one place create environmental costs somewhere else.
Tesla’s manufacturing footprint is enormous. Battery production is resource intensive. Lithium extraction has social and environmental consequences that are hard to square with clean energy narratives. Workforce conditions and union relations have been criticised. Product quality and customer experience have at times felt secondary to output targets.
As a buddhist, I find sitting on a mountain and claiming nirvana without living in the real world hypocritical, so for me, Tesla isn’t bad for this compromise, it’s living in the jungles, not in the monastery.
But, the danger for purpose driven companies is not the imperfection, it’s the denial. When the story becomes so polished that it can no longer absorb criticism, purpose turns into branding.
Therefore, another metric must matter. Does the company engage honestly with the harm it creates while pursuing its mission?
On this, Tesla is inconsistent. Sometimes transparent. Sometimes defensive. Sometimes silent.
Purpose shows up in what you optimise for
Look closely at what a company measures internally and you will find its true priorities.
Tesla optimises relentlessly for scale, speed and cost reduction. That makes sense if the goal is mass adoption. Cheaper
EVs mean more people switching. Faster factory output means fossil fuel displacement happens sooner.
But optimisation always squeezes something, and that list of squeezed things is customer-orientated, and growing as a list. Customer service has suffered. Repair ecosystems are tightly controlled. Design decisions have sometimes favoured manufacturing efficiency over human experience.
A purpose driven company still has to ask uncomfortable questions at this point. Are we optimising for transition, or are we now optimising for dominance? Because one serves the mission and the other replaces it.
The metrics that actually matter
If you want to judge Tesla on its own terms, here are the measures that matter more than headlines.
- Displacement. How many internal combustion miles has Tesla actually removed from the system? Not vehicles sold, but fossil fuel usage avoided.
- Accessibility. Are sustainable options becoming genuinely attainable for average households, or drifting back into premium territory?
- Ecosystem change. Has Tesla forced regulation, infrastructure and competitor behaviour to move faster than they otherwise would have?
- Honesty. Does the company acknowledge trade-offs, failures and unintended consequences without spin?
- Coherence. Do Tesla’s actions still point in the same direction as its stated mission, even when it is inconvenient or expensive?
Purpose is coherence over time.
So how is Tesla doing?
Tesla has already succeeded in one crucial way. The transition to electric vehicles is no longer a fringe conversation. It is inevitable. That alone fulfils a large part of its mission.
The harder part is now unfolding. Staying purpose led when the fight shifts from proving something is possible to deciding how power is used once you have it.
The companies that change the world are rarely the ones that finish the job cleanly. But the ones that endure are those willing to keep re-interrogating their own story.
Tesla does not need to be perfect. It needs to stay pointed north.
Because the moment the mission becomes a justification rather than a compass, purpose stops accelerating anything at all.
Back in Westfield Stratford, I was faced with a choice between a vast electric car and the frozen yoghurt stand opposite. Reader, I chose the yoghurt, and I regret nothing.
