Elon Musk’s AI Masterplan Review: Is the Near Future Report Worth It?

The newest ad from the Near Future Report is selling a three-part story it calls “Elon Musk’s NEW AI masterplan.” The promise is the kind that makes you sit up and then immediately want to see the fine print: buy the right “little-known company that makes a technology that’s critical for Elon Musk,” and you can ride a buildout the pitch says could “unleash enough wealth to make every household in America $2.38 million.” The mechanism is a three-step walk through how Musk will “take control of the entire AI industry,” from the chips, to the energy, to the applications.

We pulled the whole presentation apart, checked the numbers against what those companies actually do, and read the offer’s fine print. Here is what we found.

The Presenter

The presentation is hosted by the editor of the Near Future Report, a former tech executive who has built a following around the “Accelerated AI” thesis, the idea that photonics and specialized silicon will make AI dramatically faster and cheaper over the next few years. The letter’s house style is to anchor each pitch to a specific, dated catalyst and to lean on a physical prop, a pattern regular readers of Brownstone Research will recognize from earlier campaigns built around a “golden tablet” inference chip and an October “AI Super Chip” event.

The credentials are real. This is the same research shop that flagged Nvidia early in the AI cycle, and its defining move has been to frame the opportunity not around the headline names but around the suppliers who sell into whatever those names build. The presentation here follows that template exactly: the money, it argues, is not in betting on Musk directly but in owning the “backdoor” suppliers who get paid whether or not any single robot or data center ships. That is a genuinely useful lens, and it is the part of the pitch that holds up best under scrutiny.

The track-record framing is worth noting too. Like most letters in this space, the promo cites its past calls selectively and buries the hedge in fine print: the wins are maximum gains, not average outcomes, and the disclaimer that “these are no guarantee for performance” does the honest work. None of that is unusual, but it is the context you should hold in mind while the presentation rolls through its biggest numbers.

The Big Idea

The ad is actually three pitches stacked on top of each other, each with its own “secret” stock and its own special report. Step one is the chips, step two is the energy, and step three is the applications.

Step one argues Musk will build a massive chipmaking operation and that the machine supplier behind it could be “on the receiving end of up to $500 billion in 2027 alone.” That report is aimed at ASML, the Dutch monopoly in extreme-ultraviolet lithography. Step two points at the energy layer, a “space chip” supplier that has co-produced billions of chips used across Starlink, which resolves to STMicroelectronics. Step three, the applications layer, is the robotics pick: a “little-known Tesla supplier” making power controllers and sensor technology for the Optimus humanoid robot. That one is ON Semiconductor.

Our teardown focuses on ON, because it is the one name in the bundle that is genuinely new to us. ASML and STMicroelectronics have already been covered in earlier teardowns, so the interesting question here is whether the Optimus story alone is enough to carry the third report. It is a smaller, more specific question than the ad’s sweeping “take control of the entire AI industry” framing, and it is the question that actually matters for anyone considering the subscription.

The connective logic across all three steps is the same: Musk’s buildout, whatever form it takes, will buy an enormous amount of chips, energy, and power electronics, and the companies that supply those inputs stand to benefit before, and regardless of whether, the consumer-facing products ever ship. That is the strongest version of the thesis, and it is worth separating from the weaker, more breathless version the ad actually runs.

The Key Claims

The most eye-catching number in the ad belongs to step one, not to ON. The “$500 billion in 2027” figure is aimed at ASML, and it does not survive contact with reality: no semiconductor equipment maker is anywhere near booking half a trillion dollars in a year, and nobody in that business is even at $50 billion in annual revenue today. It is the kind of rhetorical flourish that should make a reader slow down and weigh everything else in the ad more carefully.

For ON specifically, the claims are softer. The ad says ON is “already supplying Tesla with a key piece of sensor technology,” that “39 hedge funds are investing” in the stock, and that its power-management chips will let the Optimus robot “move efficiently, stay cool, and run longer without needing to stop and recharge as often.” The implied promise is that ON is the “backdoor” into the robotics wave, the “Manifested AGI Revolution” as the special report puts it.

The mechanism underneath those claims is not crazy. Robots need a lot of power electronics. Every joint, every motor, every sensor in a humanoid robot needs chips that can switch current on and off very fast, very precisely, and with minimal wasted heat. That is exactly what ON Semiconductor does. The company is the second-largest power chipmaker in the world, and it is one of the biggest suppliers of image sensors to the automotive market. Its silicon goes into electric-vehicle drivetrains, automotive safety systems, and industrial energy infrastructure.

So the thesis has a real foundation: if Tesla’s Optimus robot ever reaches mass production, the robots will need power chips and sensing chips, and ON is a credible supplier of both. Tesla already buys ON’s image-sensor technology for its cars, and the ad’s point that the relationship could extend to Optimus is plausible rather than invented. Morgan Stanley has flagged ON as a way to play the robotics trend.

The gap is timing and scale. Today ON’s revenue is overwhelmingly automotive and industrial, not robots, and the Optimus program is still years away from shipping in volume. The “manifested AI” story has been the presenter’s pitch for more than a year already, and the company’s own numbers have not yet shown a robot-driven inflection. The mechanism is real, but it is a story about what could happen, not what has happened.

The Free Ticker

The free pick is ON Semiconductor, ticker ON. The tease price and the current price are the same number, $71.67, which tells you something important about how fresh this ad is. This is not a case where the newsletter named a stock six months ago and it has since run away. This is a re-pitch of a name the presenter has been recommending on and off for more than a year, essentially quoted at the current price.

ON has a market cap of roughly $28 billion and trades at about 18 times forward earnings, with expectations for 30 to 40 percent earnings growth this year. It is a quality franchise: the number-two power chipmaker in the world, a real moat in automotive image sensors, and a supplier relationship with Tesla that is already live, so the extension to Optimus is a reasonable inference rather than a marketing invention.

The valuation is defensible but not obviously cheap. Eighteen times forward earnings for a company expected to grow earnings 30 to 40 percent is a fair price if the growth lands. The risk is that this is exactly the setup ON has had before. In 2021 and 2022 ON was the hot electric-vehicle story, and the stock got ahead of itself, then gave most of it back. Its earnings per share today are about half of what they were at that peak, and the share price is roughly where it was five years ago. That is a reminder that semiconductor demand is cyclical, and the “next big thing” narrative has burned this exact stock before.

The robotics revenue question is the crux. An investor buying ON today is buying an automotive and industrial power-semiconductor business at a fair multiple, with a free option on robots. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to own. It is just not the “secret” the ad is selling.

What You Get

The product is the Near Future Report, priced at $179 for the first year and renewing at $199, with a 30-day refund window. The subscription is Brownstone Research’s flagship technology letter, covering the companies the team believes will lead the AI buildout over the next few years.

The “AI Masterplan” bundle itself packages three special reports, one per step: a chip-equipment report built around the Terafab thesis, an energy report built around the space-data-center chip supplier, and the robotics report built around the Optimus power-and-sensor pick. The reports are the hook; the subscription is the product. As with most of these offers, the special reports come free with a new membership, and the real question is whether the ongoing letter is worth the renewal price, not just whether the headline report sounds exciting.

The 30-day refund is a real, if standard, protection. You can read the reports and decide whether the letter’s ongoing research is worth keeping before the card is charged again. That is worth more than the special reports themselves, because it lets you evaluate the actual product, the ongoing coverage, rather than the one-time pitch.

Our Take

The underlying idea here has a real foundation, and the presenter deserves credit for picking a supplier whose relationship with Tesla is already real rather than invented. ON is a quality company, reasonably valued, and if you want exposure to the long-run electrification and robotics theme, it is a legitimate way to get it. The “physical AI” framing has a basis in reality too: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has argued that physical AI could be larger than digital AI over time, and the robotics buildout will genuinely consume an enormous amount of power electronics.

But the promo is overselling. This is not a “secret” and it is not a “backdoor.” It is a well-known large-cap semiconductor company that has been pitched as a robotics play for more than a year, being re-pitched at the current price under an Elon Musk headline. The robotics catalyst is real but distant, and the stock’s own history shows that when the hype runs ahead of the fundamentals, the price eventually corrects.

The “$500 billion” marquee number, aimed at a different report, is a credibility tax on the whole ad. The “39 hedge funds” line is filler that is true of essentially every large-cap. And the name-drop structure, where “Elon Musk” does more work than any specific, verifiable catalyst for ON, is a tell that the marketing is outrunning the analysis.

Our recommendation: buy ON if you believe in the company on its own merits, at 18 times forward earnings with a real automotive-and-industrial business underneath it. Do not buy it because of a “$2.38 million per household” headline. The Near Future Report itself, at $179 with a 30-day refund, is a reasonable way to sample the research if you already follow the Brownstone thesis, but the “Masterplan” framing is a marketing layer, not a reason to subscribe.

Where to Learn More

NewsletterVetter is an independent publication. We receive compensation from some of the services we review through affiliate links. Nothing on this site is investment advice. Always do your own research.