“My predictions about achieving full self-driving have been optimistic in the past,” Musk admitted to buyers in 2023. “I’m the boy who cried FSD.” He certainly has. Many times. Indeed, Musk has a long history of making outlandish promises and unfulfilled predictions about his businesses—and it’s a habit that seems hard to break.
On the Tesla earnings call with investors in late April, Elon Musk reportedly sounded aggrieved as he was forced to acknowledge a woeful 71 percent dip in profits. On the defensive, and seemingly grasping for positive spin among the dire results, Musk promised something implausible: The carmaker would become the world’s leading robotics company, ushering in 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 own personal C-3PO or R2-D2, but even better.”)
On the decision, regardless of tanking worldwide gross 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 buyers to disregard the non-autonomous-car enterprise and assess the “value of the company” on “delivering sustainable abundance with our affordable AI-powered robots.”
Nonetheless, regardless that 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 right this moment, however because the robotics behemoth Musk claims it’s 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 “next year” turns up repeatedly, solely to be constantly confirmed improper.
“My predictions have a pretty good track record,” Musk advised Tesla workers at an all-hands assembly in March. This is a chronological have a look at that observe report.
19 Years of Damaged Guarantees
August 2006: False Begin
“[Our] long term plan is to build a wide range of models, including affordably priced family cars,” wrote Elon Musk within the Tesla Secret Grasp Plan hosted on the Tesla web site 19 years in the past. “When someone buys the Tesla Roadster,” he added, “they are actually helping pay for development of the low-cost family car.”
In Grasp Plan, Half Deux, written 10 years after the primary plan, Musk reiterated that, regardless that Tesla had not but delivered on the 2006 promise, it nonetheless deliberate to construct an “affordable, high-volume car.” 2016 got here and went with out an entry-level automobile. In January this yr, Musk mentioned that—lastly—Tesla would begin producing the reasonably priced 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 lying (again),” eliciting the Reuters response that “[Musk] did not identify any specific inaccuracies.” A Tesla supply advised 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 source form of transportation that could revolutionize travel.” 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 nonetheless promising that Hyperloop might go from Boston to New York Metropolis “in less 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 in which passengers travel in autonomous electric 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.
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