ELON Musk has spearheaded fantastic engineering achievements in his career – he’s also let several high-flying promises fall completely flat.
Check out some of the declarations Musk would rather forget.
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Self-driving cars by 2019
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In 2017, Musk said it would take “about two years” to build a self-driving car that people feel confident enough to sleep in while it’s moving.
It is now 2022 and Tesla does have a robust auto-pilot program – but there have been cases where pedestrians were struck by Teslas while in self-driving mode.
The Smart Summons feature – which calls the car from a parking space to the owner – steered a driverless Tesla directly into a $3.5million dollar private jet.
It’s a far cry from a completely autonomous road.
COVID-19 would be contained by April 2020
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Musk took a regrettable stance on the COVID-19 pandemic during the early, chaotic days when there were far more questions than answers.
On March 6, 2020, he tweeted “the coronavirus panic is dumb” as COVID-19 deaths surpassed 3,000 worldwide.
He doubled down and said there would be “probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April,” in a tweet – almost 90million cases later, it’s safe to say the world’s richest man was a bit off.
Botched Twitter buyout
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“Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it,” Musk wrote in documents shared with the Twitter board in April.
Musk’s attempted acquisition of Twitter has kept him squarely in the spotlight – his following on Twitter has grown by the tens of millions and his pledge to reinstate former President Trump’s Twitter account earned him the praise of conservatives online.
But the deal has imploded – Musk is planning to pull out and even if the break is clean, he is not getting out of this unscathed.
His personal wealth has decreased by $65billion since he jumped into Twitter – the entire stunt spooked Tesla shareholders and the electric car company’s stock price has taken a considerable dip.
Depending on the result of the upcoming legal battle, musk could be on the hook for a $1billion dollar termination fee.
Multiple Starship explosions
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What goes up, must come down (in pieces).
In 2016, Musk said, “if things go according to plan, we should be able to launch people probably in 2024 with arrival in 2025.”
SpaceX has run several tests of Starship – a rocket with the potential to become SpaceX’s flagship spacecraft – but on four occasions, the rocket blew up.
The longest flight was just under seven minutes – Musk has since pushed back his humans-on-Mars prediction several years.
Musk says the newest Starship will be “ready to fly” this month with more launches booked for August and September.
The world is on edge to see one of Musk’s hypotheses tested yet again.
“These are just guesses, people shouldn’t hold me to these things,” Musk said in a TED interview. “The point is not that it was a few years late, but that it happened at all.”
Musk has several open-ended predictions on the record – he hopes to put people on Mars by 2029, thinks artificial intelligence could be more dangerous than nukes and says we’re all living in a simulation.
