This is a pretty good observation IMO. I've always wondered why his timelines are so ridiculous. It jives with what you said because maybe he looks at current state and can follow it to the end state but misses the unknowns in-between. The devil is always in the details. But i would expect that of someone relatively new to the job of GettingThingsDone and Musk has been doing this for a long time. I can't get my head around why his timelines are so outside the realm of reality. Any date he gives i just mentally ignore because it's wildly unreliable.