Yeah, you definitely can.

1) Tesla driving fully autonomously from LA to NY by the end of 2017 [1][and many others]

2) Tesla producing 10,000 cars per week by the end of 2018 [2][3]

3) "Funding secured" [4]

4) All Teslas produced after Oct 2016 have all the hardware necessary for full self driving [5]. This was apparently before Tesla realized they needed/wanted to design a custom ASIC for full self driving.

Many more.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-two-years-car-20285...

[2] https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/tesla-ceo-musk-th...

[3] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1117526382563643392

[4] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776

[5] https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

Like the comments earlier mentioned - he got electric cars to the consumer market, in bulk, in less than 10 years. That alone brings a ton of respect.

Now, if I were an investor, I would be inclined to agree with you.

I do see that I am "moving goalposts" and should have specified what I meant in my initial post.

All were done on time, in Mars years, the calendar of his home planet.

1) It's again that time of the year... although this time he merely promised FSD to be feature complete by the end of the year. I think same will happen 2021, 2022, etc.

2) That they did achieve pretty much that, just a bit late.

3) Head scratcher, but some speculation it was to fend off a hostile takeover attempt. A bit fishy indeed.

4) They do replace all HW 2 & 2.5 computers for free, if the owner got FSD package.

2) Pretty sure Tesla is still not producing 10k cars per week. Their Q2 2020 update shows max quarterly production was ~105k in Q42019, which is ~8k per week. I can't find anything suggesting they have ever peaked over 10k per week.

4) Replacing old hardware is obviously not the same as shipping all the necessary hardware in 2016.

Currently listening to the biography on Musk, he jokingly accepts that his timelines are all off, but he doesn't feel too bad about it because he eventually hits the goals. When asked about comments that a timeline for an electric car took a couple years longer than he had predicted (like a 1 year prediction, and it took 3.5 years, or something like that) he said roughly "Oh yeah, that's crazy. But I didn't know that yet, I'd never done this. We got it done eventually, but that's an unrealistic timeline".

He says he makes timelines based off what he knows, and as he gets more data, he gets more realistic with the timelines. I agree he is getting better with the timelines. And he generally builds everything he talks about eventually.

You can try doing the same thing in your job and see how that will end. The mere fact that he doesn't just get away with it, but also gets funding every singel time, and has a huge cult following, makes all of my BS whistle ring.

Maybe the trick is to be your own boss, risk your own personal wealth, and not try “getting away” with stuff at your job.

Which I am now. In which case you have to get away with missed deadlines with your customers, banks and, if there are any investors. Good luck with that.

As long as you don't ask him about Neuralink (-:

I don't see any problems with that since he isn't using public funds or selling anything:

"By July 2019, it had received $158 million in funding (of which $100 million was from Musk)"

(from Wikipedia)

I was responding to the enormity of his claims, not the question of ethics.

That's some deliberate misreading.

"people who get brain surgery from him" - the tweet doesn't say from him.

"since Elon Musk told Jay Clayton of the SEC to" - he didn't say it to Jay Clayton.

"since Elon Musk promised to get rid of most possessions" - he didn't promise anything.

"since Elon Musk promised to produce ventilators at the SpaceX factory" - saying SpaceX is 'working on venitilators' is not any such promise.

"Elon Musk assured parents that" - there is no context about "assuring parents", he was justifying a previous prediction.

"since Elon Musk advised consumers that Teslas can safely function as a boat for short periods of time" - the Tweet doesn't say "safely" it came with a video on escaping a sinking car by rolling down the window, and he's saying the electronics are water-sealed and it won't lose power to a blocked air intake (like an ICE vehicle).

"since Elon Musk offered a chance to fly to Mars and work off the price of the ticket with a Mars job" - nope, since Elon Musk said "the goal needs to be such that anyone can go, with loans available" in the context of "how will people be chosen to go to Mars".

What an awful website. As if there isn't enough real strange stuff he's said without making shit up and then linking directly to the Tweets which don't say what it claims they say.

I'm pretty sure you can do that more now than ever, after courts in more and more countries are shutting down their "Autopilot" marketing.

> now that Tesla is meeting production goals

Where's the magic cross-country self-driving car that was meant to show up in 2016? And just how 'self driving ready' are those Model 3s?

> SpaceX is landing boosters

A mere decade or so after promised.

I think both of these are examples of dubious marketing promises, though the Tesla one is more egregious (the SpaceX one is merely extremely late). But either way, I wouldn't depend on any of their timelines going forward.

I don't think learning a problem is harder than you thought and then still solving it is a detriment. If anything this community should be the ones that understand that the full scope of a problem often becomes apparent once you're 80% into it.

How many startups are "guaranteed to revolutionize the world in 2 years", take 4 years to get a minimum viable product, and are gone in 6?

You solve the problem, you get my credit. Fully self driving cars though I think should have been more obvious that it wasn't going to happen anytime soon.. not just to Musk but to everyone working on it. It'll get there eventually too, but it's still early days.

> Fully self driving cars though I think should have been more obvious that it wasn't going to happen anytime soon.. not just to Musk but to everyone working on it

Well, yes, this is my point. He _must_ have known that his cross-country no-driver car wasn't practical when he was promoting it. If he didn't know himself, any expert in the field would tell him, and presumably did.

He never promised to land boosters in 2007, the Falcon 9 hadnt even flown yet. In fact their original reusability plans were based around parachute recovery.

Where are my flying cars? Where is my fusion reactor?

Neither were promised to you by Airbus under a specific contract.

I mean, if you're saying that Musk's claims are less extravagant than those of newspaper columnists playing at futurology, then, yes, that's true. But it's the lowest of low bars.

A lot of us knew the self-driving car industry was bullshit. Tesla wasn't piling it any higher or deeper than everyone else. Within this iteration of the discipline, there was something approaching consensus (ie all of the loudest voices agree with each other). Outside of that bubble, some of the rest of us had very strong convictions that they were nucking futs.

Some of us know, as sure as we know the sun will rise tomorrow, that AI and fusion are going to arrive within five years of each other. Which is to say, "don't make any life plans around either".

But you have to be a scholar or of a certain age to have a grasp of 1) how many times and with how little evidence we've been promised both and 2) the painfully vivid ways in which this series of events has resembled Charlie Brown and that football. She's lying to you Charlie. She is always lying to you.