Yesterday I took a short trip. I began with a ride on the local Hyperloop, which ran through a tunnel dug by Boring Company. Then I used my neural implant to summon a fully self-driving Tesla robotaxi. While enroute I read the latest news from the Mars colony.
OK, none of that actually happened, because those products don’t exist. There are no working Hyperloops. The Boring Company has not dug any commercial tunnels. Tesla has a few self-driving — though not fully self-driving — taxis in Austin and nowhere else. (Google’s Waymo driverless taxis are operational in several major hubs.) Neuralink, which is purportedly pioneering brain implants, has tested its products in a handful of patients but done no more than that. And of course there is no Mars colony: there have been no manned flights to Mars, nor the prospect of any for the foreseeable future.
Yet at various points over the past decade Elon Musk promised that each of these services would be available by 2025 if not sooner.
…
With thanks to Mark Palko for sharing: yes, this seems like a spot-on observation of Musk’s career:
- a few unqualified successes (Tesla leading the charge on the EV rollout; Starlink providing widespread Internet), and
- a lot more unfulfilled promises and vapourware (Twitter’s post-takeover nosedive, the failure to deliver anything-of-use by Neuralink, The Boring Company/Hyperloop, the worse-than-pointless Grokipedia, all the things SpaceX hasn’t yet done…).
The vast majority of his wealth comes from investment, not from returns: people buy his stock if they buy his hype. I’m not saying he’s producing nothing of value… but yeah: the “world’s first trillionaire” is… unfortunate.
But then again, I’d be quite happy for him to be the world’s last trillionaire, too.
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