They say you can measure a man’s ambition by the infrastructure he leaves behind.
If that’s true, then Elon Musk may not be building cars at all. He may be building civilization itself.
At first glance, Tesla’s Supercharger network appears to be a functional, data-driven rollout of EV charging infrastructure, an ambitious but straightforward play to make electric travel mainstream. But look closer. Pay attention to where the chargers are. Not just on interstates. Not just in dense urban cores.
You’ll find them outside hotels. At shopping malls. On the edges of Walmarts. At the back end of retail plazas that look… eerily underutilized.
Now pause. Ask yourself: Why?
Why place thousands of chargers in the kinds of locations where cars aren’t just passing through… but lingering? Why build in zones associated with sleeping, shopping, and living?
Maybe, just maybe, Elon Musk is building a mobile civilization.
Let’s start with what doesn’t exist.
As of mid-2025, Tesla has not released a recreational vehicle. No Class B electric motorhome. No officially announced Tesla-branded RV.
But that hasn’t stopped thousands of people from DIY retrofitting their Model Xs and Cybertrucks into mobile homes.
And Musk? He’s encouraged it. He’s mused publicly about a Tesla van. He’s floated the idea of solar-powered mobile charging stations.
And yet, no formal Tesla RV.
Which raises the real question:
Why hasn’t he released it?
The answer may be as strategic as it is philosophical: because the infrastructure must come first.
You can’t sell a house on wheels until the world has roads, energy, and utilities that follow it. And in the last five years, Musk has quietly been building exactly that.