Elon Musk was boasting a few days ago that his predictions have generally come true. This comes as a surprise to me.
It turns out it was as long ago as 2013 that we all got excited about self-driving cars and their imminent arrival. Musk has made regular promises about such technology, usually several times a year, but still no self-driving cars.
We all know he wants to go to Mars. In fact, he reckoned he would send two rockets there by the end of 2022. That moved to 2025, now 2029. Not to mention that StarShip, among all the rapid unplanned disassemblies, does not meet specifications and will probably never work as promised.
Then there’s his Boring Company. The idea was to have a tunnel for public transport. He expects cars to travel through this tunnel at 250kmh. They don’t. His sales patter following the obvious failure is like that of a perpetual motion crank: the prototype is there, we just need more money.
Predictions for Neuralink are for 2025. Maybe they will come true. On the other hand, research suggests that the human brain is like a very very slow modem in computing terms and cannot be linked to a gigabyte stream. I await the breakthrough.
Most recently, he predicted he could put a puppet in charge of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Despite spending $25million on this project, and engaging in outright election fraud, he got that wrong as well.