Sure, it's just hard to take any of his dates seriously when they're consistently wrong. I love the guy, but he tends to stretch himself a bit thin.

My theory is that the public date announcements are actually a bit of a perverse incentive to motivate his employees to work longer hours to meet the arbitrary date specified.

And himself. Sometimes you'd never start a project if you thought "it'll take me years".

I'm not sure it's that he's stretched thin or just that he never pads his estimates. When Elon Musk says he's going to deliver X in three months, the unspoken coda is always "assuming every bit of uncertainty falls my way". And of course, it never does in a nontrivial project. For anyone.