“My predictions about attaining full self-driving have been optimistic prior to now,” Musk admitted to buyers in 2023. “I’m the boy who cried FSD.” He actually has. Many occasions. Certainly, Musk has an extended historical past of constructing outlandish guarantees and unfulfilled predictions about his companies—and it is a behavior that appears exhausting to interrupt.
On the Tesla earnings name with buyers in late April, Elon Musk reportedly sounded aggrieved as he was compelled to acknowledge a woeful 71 % 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 turn out to be the world’s main robotics firm, ushering within the “closest factor to heaven we will 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 personal private C-3PO or R2-D2, however even higher.”)
On the decision, regardless of tanking worldwide gross sales for his firm’s growing old vehicles 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 inexpensive AI-powered robots.”
Nonetheless, though Musk has an extended historical past of damaged guarantees, buyers appeared soothed by tales of crushing market domination for Tesla, not because the automobile firm it’s at this time, however because the robotics behemoth Musk claims it would quickly turn out to be.
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 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 persistently confirmed improper.
“My predictions have a fairly good observe file,” Musk instructed Tesla employees at an all-hands assembly in March. This 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 vehicles,” wrote Elon Musk within the Tesla Secret Grasp 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 growth of the low-cost household automobile.”
In Grasp Plan, Half 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 “inexpensive, high-volume automobile.” 2016 got here and went with out an entry-level automobile. In January this yr, Musk mentioned that—lastly—Tesla would begin producing the inexpensive mannequin within the second half of 2025.
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] didn’t determine any particular inaccuracies.” A Tesla supply instructed 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 nonetheless 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 by which 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 challenge was taken up by different firms in 2017.
