He said he aimed to have 5000 Optimus robots out by end of 2025, 50000 by 2026 and 10 times that in 2027.
He promised in 2015 that full autonomous driving would arrive in 2 years and we aren't there yet 11 years later. He even said in 2016 that there would be coast-to-coast autonomous driving in 2017.
He promised manned missions to Mars by 2024-2025 in multiple interviews between 2011 and 2016.
He promised in 2016 that there would be solar roofs expansions by 2017 that didn't pan out, he promised AGI by 2025 in 2024.
Elon Musk has repeatedly lied about outcomes of his ventures, gotten crazy valuations based on those exaggerations and now people are starting to finally wake up that he isn't as good as his ego.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/the-...
Why? Have US-backed NGOs never saved a single life with their spending?
You can argue it's not worth the spending, perhaps, but you really can't argue that it's not happening somewhere.
> This is a reason why the US is trillions in debt.
This is a tiny, tiny, nearly invisible fraction of that reason.
- USAID's final budget was $34 billion. That's already very real money, but it came from the discretionary budget - that giant bill of spending where the government decides what to spend money on: schools, roads, housing, and so on. The entire discretionary budget for 2025 was $1.9 trillion, so USAID made up almost 2% of all the US' federal discretionary spending!
- Nothing USAID was doing was irreplaceable. The vacuum their exit has created is being rapidly filled by a wide mix of other interests. So saying they are saving a life when they are just another replaceable entity, even if a rather large one, is misleading. It's kind of like saying Google is why we have web browsers.
- USAID and the CIA worked hand-in-hand. For instance one project was USAID/CIA starting a fake social media site [1] in Cuba specifically with the goal of trying to create an insurrection, which would undoubtedly be very bloody had they succeeded. So in your calculus you need to account for deaths caused by USAID as well.
- Many of their programs seemed geared towards the creation of dependencies rather than working to ensure the self sustainability of various places. I think this likely ties into the above issue. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life, give a man a fish a day and you now control that man because he's dependent upon you. Sociopathic intelligence agencies blending with philanthropy is a rather horrific combination.
(This is a reference to Bill Clinton's extremely successful "Reinventing Government" initiative which actually balanced the federal budget until the next republican came along...)
Trump's OBBBA will be another reason, expected to add several trillion in the next few years. So yeah, real cuts are probably needed, but the DOGE people aren't achieving that in net.
Lots of rational people kept shorting, thinking sanity would prevail, and ended up losing bigly.
It’s a variant of the people who pick “Jay-Z” in the meme question “would you rather have half a million dollars or lunch with Jay-Z?”
I think it's a way some businesses just do business and the market has not issued a correction to that. Maybe it should?
Name 3 accomplishments he made and I'll show you world class work done elsewhere by other companies. The only thing he did which was notable was Starlink and I'll gladly grant you that. China is about to eat Starlink's lunch with their own tech.
Again I think people overestimate Musk's contributions to the world.
2. Made the modern EV relatively commonplace; no other manufacturer was taking it seriously until Tesla succeeded, and took many years to catch up, although they have
3. Re-usable rockets / higher launch cadence leading to significantly cheaper costs to put things in space. No major competition yet.
There's also the bit about people talking shit about other people they're not even close to, to feel like they matter. Ahh well
Hey guys Elon Musk sucks haha high fives all around, great
Profitably reusable rockets were a major accomplishment. People like to argue against this. Every argument I've seen is either saying it doesn't actually save money or it wasn't new, neither of which is correct. It's very hard to argue with the numbers here; SpaceX is now launching more into orbit than every other launch provider combined.
I think the main reason people downplay these things is precisely because his own claims are so exaggerated. Doing 165 orbital launches in a year just doesn't sound impressive when he promised we'd be sending people to Mars years ago.
Lies. Waymo beats Tesla in FSD. Optimus is nothing while China has full fucking martial arts robots. It's 2026 where's that 2025 manned Mars mission? Where's that 2025 AGI promise (currently running itself in circles.) His solar roof tile idea was a bunk plan and any regular roofer could've told you that.
China made a fucking electric car that can KITT jump. The only way Teslas get off the ground is when they hit curbs at batshit insane speeds.
Elon and his companies, outside of SpaceX, are generally frauds. Down to PayPal, which thinks it has a right to YOUR MONEY if you even so much as sneeze wrong (theft by contract.)
Autonomous driving is the clearest counterexample: by March 2026 Waymo had logged over 220 million rider-only miles with nobody in the driver's seat, and was doing 400,000+ rides per week across six US metros. Tesla's consumer product is still officially "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)," and Tesla itself says it does not make the car autonomous. Mercedes has Level 3 certification. Tesla has none.
Optimus missed the stated 5,000 robots in 2025. As of July 2026, Tesla still isn't selling it and is only preparing manufacturing capacity. Meanwhile Agility's Digit is in commercial warehouse deployment today. Solar Roof is worse: Musk targeted 1,000 installations per week, and Wood Mackenzie estimated Tesla averaged about 21 in 2022. Tesla's disputed the number but offered no replacement count.
SpaceX is the real exception. It genuinely leads, and the engineering is remarkable. But it's still a decade overdue on "crewed Mars by 2024." That's the point: on the one venture where "more progress than anyone else" is actually true, the promise is still failing by over a decade.
The criticism isn't that nothing comes to pass. It's that concrete near term promises repeatedly fail and get replaced by bigger ones. When a valuation depends on being uniquely far ahead, competitors catching up erases that premium fast.
He is obviously a liar, a conman and morally suspect. But he has mastered the art of lying in a way that people want to believe. So much so that he can separate fools from their money to the tune of billions.
When you can do that, every economic institution on the planet wants a piece. It's a firehouse of ill gotten cash, and those supporting his staggering rise to power are there to grab a bit of filthy lucre for themselves. It's a wealth transfer than comes along maybe only a few times in a generation.
Everyone knows he's a complete fraud even as they enable him to pull off all these stunts.
For such people, lying comes as easy as breathing. No wonder they do it all the time.