“My predictions about reaching full self-driving have been optimistic previously,” Musk admitted to investors in 2023. “I’m the boy who cried FSD.” He actually has. Many instances. Certainly, Musk has an extended 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 traders in late April, Elon Musk reportedly sounded aggrieved as he was pressured to acknowledge a woeful 71 percent dip in earnings. On the defensive, and seemingly greedy for constructive spin among the many dire outcomes, Musk promised one thing implausible: The carmaker would change 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 might 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.”)
On the decision, regardless of tanking worldwide sales for his firm’s ageing 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 traders 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 an extended historical past of damaged guarantees, traders appeared soothed by tales of crushing market domination for Tesla, not because the automobile firm it’s at present, however because the robotics behemoth Musk claims it’s going to quickly change into.
WIRED examined the historical past of Musk’s pledges on all the things from Full Self Driving, Hyperloop, Robotaxis, and, sure, robotic armies, with a view to reminding ourselves, his followers, and traders how actuality in Elon’s world not often matches as much as the rhetoric. Tellingly, Musk’s fallback forecast of “subsequent 12 months” turns up repeatedly, solely to be constantly confirmed improper.
“My predictions have a fairly good observe file,” Musk informed Tesla workers at an all-hands meeting in March. Here is a chronological take a look at that observe file.
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 12 months, Musk mentioned that—finally—Tesla would begin producing the reasonably priced mannequin within the second half of 2025.
Nevertheless, 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 straight 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 might revolutionize journey.” It didn’t. The Hyperloop was shuttered in 2023, 10 years after it was first proposed—however at the same time as late as 2022, Musk was still promising that Hyperloop might 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 venture was taken up by other companies in 2017.
