There’s a Very Simple Pattern to Elon Musk’s Broken Promises

“My predictions about attaining full self-driving have been optimistic up to now,” Musk admitted to investors in 2023. “I’m the boy who cried FSD.” He definitely has. Many instances. Certainly, Musk has a protracted historical past of creating outlandish guarantees and unfulfilled predictions about his companies—and it is a behavior that appears laborious to interrupt.

On the Tesla earnings call with buyers in late April, Elon Musk reportedly sounded aggrieved as he was compelled to acknowledge a woeful 71 percent dip in income. On the defensive, and seemingly greedy for optimistic spin among the many dire outcomes, Musk promised one thing implausible: The carmaker would develop into the world’s main robotics firm, ushering within the “closest thing to heaven we can get on Earth.” (He has since doubled down on this, stating that demand for his robots will probably be insatiable, and earlier this month he claimed that robots will quantity within the tens of billions and be like “your individual private C-3PO or R2-D2, however even higher.”)

Elon Musk at Tesla’s HQ in San Carlos, California, 2006.

{Photograph}: Joanne Ho-Younger Lee/Getty Pictures

On the decision, regardless of tanking worldwide sales for his firm’s getting old automobiles and cratering demand for the Cybertruck, Musk asserted the “future for Tesla is brighter than ever.” He batted away the precipitous fall in gross sales as merely “near-term headwinds,” urging buyers to disregard the non-autonomous-car enterprise and assess the “worth of the corporate” on “delivering sustainable abundance with our reasonably priced AI-powered robots.”

Nonetheless, though Musk has a protracted historical past of damaged guarantees, buyers appeared soothed by tales of crushing market domination for Tesla, not because the automobile firm it’s as we speak, however because the robotics behemoth Musk claims it is going to quickly develop into.

WIRED examined the historical past of Musk’s pledges on the whole lot from Full Self Driving, Hyperloop, Robotaxis, and, sure, robotic armies, with a view to reminding ourselves, his followers, and buyers how actuality in Elon’s world not often matches as much as the rhetoric. Tellingly, Musk’s fallback forecast of “subsequent yr” turns up repeatedly, solely to be constantly confirmed fallacious.

“My predictions have a fairly good monitor document,” Musk instructed Tesla workers at an all-hands meeting in March. This is a chronological have a look at that monitor document.

19 Years of Damaged Guarantees

August 2006: False Begin

“[Our] long run plan is to construct a variety of fashions, together with affordably priced household automobiles,” wrote Elon Musk within the Tesla Secret Master Plan hosted on the Tesla web site 19 years in the past. “When somebody buys the Tesla Roadster,” he added, “they’re truly serving to pay for improvement of the low-cost household automobile.”

In Master Plan, Part Deux, written 10 years after the primary plan, Musk reiterated that, though Tesla had not but delivered on the 2006 promise, it nonetheless deliberate to construct an “reasonably priced, high-volume automobile.” 2016 got here and went with out an entry-level automobile. In January this yr, Musk mentioned that—finally—Tesla would begin producing the reasonably priced mannequin within the second half of 2025.

Musk in 2006 with a primary technology Tesla Roadster.

{Photograph}: Chris Weeks/Getty Pictures

Nonetheless, in April, Reuters reported that Tesla had scrapped plans for a budget household automobile. Musk posted on X that “Reuters is mendacity (once more),” eliciting the Reuters response that “[Musk] did not identify any specific inaccuracies.” A Tesla source told Reuters that as a substitute of the long-promised low-cost household automobile, “Elon’s directive is to go all in on robotaxi.”

August 2013: Hyperloop Hype

Whereas he didn’t instantly personal any of the Hyperloop firms, in a 58-page white paper titled “Hyperloop Alpha”, Musk wrote of a “new open supply type of transportation that would revolutionize journey.” It didn’t. The Hyperloop was shuttered in 2023, 10 years after it was first proposed—however whilst late as 2022, Musk was still promising that Hyperloop may go from Boston to New York Metropolis “in lower than half an hour.”

A type of magnetic levitation (maglev) capsule in an air-evacuated metal tube on stilts, Hyperloop was described on the corporate’s web site as being an “ultra-high-speed public transportation system wherein passengers journey in autonomous electrical pods at 600+ miles per hour.” This description has since been eliminated however was documented by Electrek. Engineers from Tesla and SpaceX labored on Hyperloop for 2 years earlier than the undertaking was taken up by other companies in 2017.