Musk has lot of bold goals, but how many has he achieved?
From
a425couple@a425couple@hotmail.com to
alt.astronomy,rec.aviation.military,fl.politics,alt.economics on Sat Jun 13 06:12:30 2026
From Newsgroup: alt.astronomy
from Seattle Times
Musk has lot of bold goals, but how many has he achieved?
Whether itrCOs a colony on Mars or autonomous cars, he thinks big
Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, on screen in Times Square on Friday.
SpaceX has made history with the biggest-ever IPO, launching it into the
top ranks of the largest public companies and making Musk the worldrCOs
first trillionaire. (Victor J. Blue / Bloomberg)
Image 1 of 2NEXT IMAGE
By Kirsten Grind, JACK EWING, Aaron Krolik and Lily Boyce The New York Times
Elon Musk has laid out hundreds of goals over the years for what he
plans to achieve at his businesses.
Musk, 54, has said his rocket company, SpaceX, will build a colony of
humans on Mars. He has said that Tesla, his electric-car maker, will incorporate fully autonomous driving abilities into all of its cars. And
he has promised to show that humanoid robots made by Tesla are dexterous enough to thread a needle.
None of these have happened.
Ahead of SpaceXrCOs initial public offering Friday, The New York Times analyzed statements Musk has made about his businesses on social media
or during investor calls over the last 15 years. He delivered only some
of what he said he would when he said he would, the analysis found.
Strikingly, MuskrCOs annual rate of success declined over time, even as he made more promises. Of the 13 goals he declared in 2015, he later
achieved nearly three-quarters of them, The Times found. But of the 27
claims he made in 2020, fewer than half have been accomplished on time.
Some still have deadlines far in the future.
MuskrCOs ability to follow through on what he says is increasingly in the spotlight with SpaceXrCOs IPO, which was the largest offering ever. The billionaire has major ambitions for the company, which operates rocket launches and the Starlink satellite internet service, as well as
artificial intelligence efforts and the social media platform X.
Musk owns 50% of SpaceX and controls more than 85% of the shareholder
votes, according to its prospectus. His grip on the company is tight,
and the performance of SpaceX, which has valued itself at $1.25
trillion, hinges on whether he does what he says he will, such as
putting AI data centers into orbit.
About 150 of MuskrCOs goals over the years were about SpaceX, The Times
found. Of those, about 32% were achieved within one year of their stated
goal, while 19% were more than a year late or remained unfulfilled. Half
of the goals could not be verified because the plans were too vague or
the date was too far out.
Many CEOs overpromise and underdeliver. But Musk is a singular figure in
the business world, and what he says carries extra weight. Investors
typically bet on him specifically, based on his record of disrupting industries such as cars and rockets.
At Tesla, where Musk serves as CEO and owns about 20% of shares, the companyrCOs $1.3 trillion market capitalization relies largely on his
future plans, according to analyst estimates.
rCLThe market is trading and selling on what he is saying,rCY Skyy Moore, a corporate lawyer who has reviewed TeslarCOs financial filings, said of Musk.
The Times analyzed more than 69,000 of MuskrCOs social media posts from
2011 through this past January, as well as his public comments on 19
Tesla investor calls since 2021, when transcripts became available. The
Times compiled what Musk said about Tesla, which is publicly traded, and
his five private companies, SpaceX, Neuralink, X, xAI and the Boring
Co., though SpaceX recently absorbed X and xAI.
From those, The Times tallied any public statement that Musk made in
which he committed to a future deadline about his businesses. The
analysis did not include comments on podcasts, in media interviews and
at other events.
Musk has gotten into trouble several times for making public statements
about Tesla and X, formerly known as Twitter, that did not pan out.
Public companies are prohibited by law from misrepresenting or omitting information to investors, which could amount to securities fraud.
The highest-profile instance was in 2018 when Musk said he had secured
funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share, though he had not lined
up the financing for such a deal. He did not end up taking Tesla private.
That same year, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Musk with securities fraud and accused him of misleading investors. Musk and Tesla
soon settled with the regulator for $40 million without admitting or
denying wrongdoing. Musk also stepped down as TeslarCOs chairperson, and
the board agreed to review his communications.
In 2023, Musk separately prevailed against a lawsuit aiming to hold him responsible for investor losses related to his comments that he had
secured the funding to take Tesla private.
Many people have tolerated MuskrCOs behavior because he has enriched
investors with his successes at companies like Tesla. They see his
statements as a sign of ambition and his way of motivating employees.
rCLHe does set these really ambitious goals, because in his words, he
wants quantum change, and you donrCOt get quantum change asking for incremental growth,rCY said Jon McNeill, TeslarCOs president between 2015
and 2018.
Musk and representatives for SpaceX and Tesla did not return requests
for comment.
No driver needed
Musk has talked most frequently about how Tesla will achieve rCLfull self-driving,rCY the companyrCOs program for vehicles that can drive themselves without human intervention. Reaching this is important to
TeslarCOs status as the worldrCOs most valuable car company, especially as
its car sales have declined since 2023.
Over 60 of MuskrCOs more than 600 goals were related to the autonomous
driving technology, which includes TeslarCOs robotaxi program. Musk first promised the technology in 2016, according to The TimesrCO analysis.
Tesla has inched closer toward full self-driving. This year, it offered
fully autonomous rides with no human safety monitors in the Texas cities
of Austin, Dallas and Houston.
But the company lags behind other autonomous car providers. Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, which owns Google, offers driverless rides in 11
U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Miami and Phoenix.
In April, J.P. Morgan analysts said Tesla faced dwindling confidence in
its rCLability to achieve lofty out-year objectives.rCY Its stock has fallen 14% since December, when it hit a record high.
Musk recently voiced a rare mea culpa. Teslas with older computer
systems, known as Hardware 3, could not run software allowing them to
drive autonomously, he acknowledged. In 2023, he had promised that those
cars would have that ability.
rCLI wish it were otherwise,rCY he said in an investor call in April.
------------------------------------
Destination Mars
Of all the goals Musk has laid out, perhaps the most eye-catching have
been about how SpaceX will reach and colonize Mars.
Musk founded his space company in 2002 with that plan in mind, saying he wanted to make human life rCLmultiplanetary.rCY
He has made goals related to Mars 19 times, according to The TimesrCO analysis. But in his comments, MuskrCOs timeline for getting to the red
planet changed or included deadlines that are still in the future.
In 2011, he said SpaceX would reach Mars in about 10 years or rCLworst
case 15 to 20 years.rCY He appeared undaunted that Mars is about 140
million miles from Earth, with an inhospitable climate and terrain. Musk decorated SpaceXrCOs then-headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., with pictures
and maps of Mars, and one of his homes with similar renderings. SpaceX employees, including Musk, became known for wearing rCLOccupy MarsrCY T-shirts.
Over the past decade, Musk made progress toward getting to Mars. In 2016
he talked about plans for a rCLMars Colonial Transporter,rCY a spaceship
that would ferry humans to the planet. SpaceX built the rocket, which
was eventually called Starship and is larger than the Statue of Liberty.
Other plans for Starship included space where humans could live for
months at a time.
But many of MuskrCOs deadlines for reaching Mars keep shifting, which
became particularly noticeable in recent years. In March 2024, he said Starship would arrive on Mars rCLwithin five years.rCY A year later, he said the spaceship would depart for Mars rCLat the end of next year.rCY
NASA has said that the best-case scenario would be that humans reach
Mars in the mid-2030s.
In April 2024, Musk told SpaceX employees that he expected 1 million
people to be living on Mars in about 20 years. He had quietly directed employees to begin working on plans for a city there.
Yet in February, Musk revised his thinking again, saying that creating a Martian city would take rCL20+ years.rCY Instead, he said, SpaceX would colonize the moon.
While SpaceX has a contract with NASA to reach the moon, Musk had not previously aimed to build a colony there, said Robert Zubrin, an
aerospace engineer and a former friend of MuskrCOs who has informally
advised him on Mars, as well as other people close to the tech mogul.
rCLHe has become, in recent years, not too careful about how close his
remarks are to the truth,rCY Zubrin said.
Methodology: The New York Times analyzed Elon MuskrCOs posts, replies and quotes on X between December 2011 and January 2026, along with
transcripts of Tesla earnings calls from December 2021 to January 2026.
The Times used a large language model to detect rCLpromises,rCY which were defined as concrete commitments to achieve a future goal. Reporters
manually verified, researched and categorized the flagged statements,
plus a sample of those the model rejected, to build a final data set for analysis.
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From
Jim Wilkins@muratlanne@gmail.com to
alt.astronomy,rec.aviation.military,fl.politics,alt.economics on Sun Jun 14 08:59:52 2026
From Newsgroup: alt.astronomy
"Stephen Harding" wrote in message news:110m16q$3ien9$
1@dont-email.me...
"a425couple" wrote in message news:3HcXR.121080$
yYC9.81281@fx21.iad...
from Seattle Times
Musk has lot of bold goals, but how many has he achieved?
Whether itrCOs a colony on Mars or autonomous cars, he thinks big...
Yeah, that trillionaire Musk is quite the failure!
SMH
------------------------------
The combination of first-rate business plus engineering skills is very rare, more typically the inventor / industrialist who creates a company must
choose the one he's best at and hire the other, both roles require full time attention. James Watt was the engineer, Matthew Boulton the businessman. George Westinghouse, noted for inventing railroad air brakes, became the businessman instead and hired Tesla et.al. for engineering. Henry Royce was the brilliant engineer who took on car dealer Charles Rolls as his money
man. Though Eddie Rickenbacker was quite technically competent he put his mentor Lee Frayer in charge of engineering and became the CEO and chief car salesman for the Rickenbacker Motor Company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Westinghouse
I worked on this man's color printer project. He rarely visited the lab
except for meetings to raise more funding from 'angel' investors. Former Centronics engineers did the daily work.
https://whattheythink.com/articles/71875-we-remember-robert-howard/
My finance-related contribution was to take an investor's business card, digitize and clean it up, and print sample pages with their letterhead in brilliant color to prove we were making good progress. I had never expected
to become a graphic artist and printer font designer. Their process of precisely spraying molten plastic ink inspired 3D printing.
Dean Kamen isolated himself from Segway and I never encountered him there,
and don't know how much he involved himself in design. Doug Field was
Segway's senior engineer. I was usually the lab tech who filled in the
details and built functioning hardware from engineer's concepts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen
https://meche.mit.edu/people/doug-field
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From
Jim Wilkins@muratlanne@gmail.com to
alt.astronomy,rec.aviation.military,fl.politics,alt.economics on Sun Jun 14 20:05:22 2026
From Newsgroup: alt.astronomy
"Stephen Harding" wrote in message news:110ml6u$3oefu$
1@dont-email.me...
There is also the issue of scale. A person can be quite good at
engineering and management in the initial stages of a technology
development, but things get very much out of hand when the company is
initially successful and then grows.
-----------------------
That's the reason for Skunk Works, small select groups within a larger organization tasked with an often secret project and only loosely if at all supervised by management. I was read into them at both Segway and Mitre.
The name arose at Lockheed for secret jet fighter projects, after Lockheed engineers had developed one on their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_L-133
based on early steam and then gas turbine R&D by Nathan Price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_J37
British experimental electronic warfare development followed a similar
pattern of very small groups, each member solely responsible for a bounded portion such as electrical, mechanical or optical. The leader made sure one member's output matched another's needed input.
https://www.abebooks.com/9780698108967/Wizard-British-Scientific-Intelligence-1939-1945-0698108965/plp
It's well written and not as technical as it could (should) have been.
Mitre was created to address that problem for government communications etc projects, initially the DEW line, with a corporate culture that amounted to many small units dreaming up answers to assigned multidisciplinary problems with large national technical systems, like AWACS, GPS or the FAA's 1940's radio technology.
Projects bog down when the indivisible portions become too complex for one engineer. IMHO that's more typical of extensive than intensive complexity.
Two or more tend to champion different approaches unless the leader can clearly define the needs.
This is an excellent description of the Tiger Team group dynamics and effective leadership style:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
When it came out I was on a similar team developing an LSI-11 based machine
to test computer chips on the production line. Our leader was a brilliant Ph.D. with an easygoing (but very focused) beard and sandals hippie attitude and VW bus. When I mentioned I had made insulating polyester film inserts
for my home windows he mentally calculated the radiative heat transfer
through them.
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From
Jim Wilkins@muratlanne@gmail.com to
alt.astronomy,rec.aviation.military,fl.politics,alt.economics on Mon Jun 15 09:09:11 2026
From Newsgroup: alt.astronomy
"Jim Wilkins" wrote in message news:110nfis$bdt$
1@dont-email.me...
... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_J37
"Steam generation at high altitudes required air to be pressurized to sea level pressure and delivered at a constant rate to a steam generator's burners; ..."
River steamboat developer Oliver Evans had experimented with supercharging a steam engine firebox in the early 1800's but concluded it was far beyond available blacksmithing capability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Evans
In Evans' time the modern metal lathe capable of geometric precision had
only recently been invented, previously metal was turned like wood with hand-guided chisels. Machine tools that accurately cut straight and flat surfaces were still a decade or more in the future.
Iron couldn't yet be melted and was worked by heating it until soft and
sticky enough to weld into larger forms by hammering pieces together (wrought), though with oxide and slag inclusions that randomly weakened it. That is the reason steam pressure was kept very low and engines very inefficient. The initial steam engines of the 1690's tended to explode so
for safety only the vacuum from condensation was used for steam power for
the next hundred years. Practical transportation required higher pressure
and more efficient lighter engines.
The ability to melt iron, separate the slag, control the carbon content and produce steel in industrial quantity was developed between the 1850's and 1880's. Then the older ideas became practical and technology leaped forward. Historically steel could only be produced in small quantities in covered crucibles.
Steel is iron with around half to one percent by weight of carbon and as little sulfur or phosphorus as practical. Cast iron contains as much carbon from the fuel as the iron will dissolve, around 5~6%, which lowers the
melting point enough for a low tech air blast to reach but makes it brittle. Wrought iron is nearly pure iron with the carbon burnt out or not added, by regulating the air intake. Nails which are easy for the factory to form and the user to bend are similar to wrought iron.
This shows the danger of building large structures from cast and wrought
iron:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_Bridge_disaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel
The European alternative "Damascus" of moderate carbon levels for hard plus tough weapons and springs was a mix of high and low carbon steels, produced
by welding together alternating layers of both. This inventor was able to
melt and cast it, in small quantities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Huntsman
Iron ore in Austria and Sweden was also pure enough to make good Roman and Viking swords similarly, but not larger items for which they used easier melting bronze. In many ways the tech of 1800 was little better than ancient Rome's. Water and sewer utilities were worse.
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