Elon Musk causes incredible amounts of historical non-examination. There are now so many examples that it's actually difficult to list them all. My guess is that people just get very confused by the difference between late delivery and non-delivery.
> There are now so many examples that it's actually difficult to list them all.
Please, try.
Meanwhile: Hyperloop, Boring company, everything app, Mars colonies, FSD... Maybe he'll end up delivering on some of these (most probably partially, at best), but with Musk, overpromising and underdelivering in the norm. There's nothing to be confused about.
Thousands of hours of video about the companies and their products, hundreds of hours of interviews with Musk, thousands of tweets by Musk, financial filings of Tesla and SpaceX, you can test drive a Tesla for free in most parts of the world, you can use Starlink in most parts of the world, you can ride a Cybercab in Austin, you can watch a rocket launch livestream or in person, you can watch videos about people who had their lives changed from Neuralink, etc.
I can't think of another person of similar prominence who has been as accessible as Musk. Partly due to the internet, but also due to his choices. I don't see Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates or the Google founders sharing their views & debating them with adversarial reporters on a regular basis. Perhaps Palmer Luckey is on track for becoming somewhat akin to Musk.
Falcon 1 had a few failures, but Falcon 9 was successful from the beginning. Early SpaceX played it safe, because they couldn't afford to lose big expensive rockets. The only explosion after launch happened on flight 19.
There were many explosions when SpaceX was trying to figure out how to land the booster safely. But those were after the booster had already completed the actual paid mission.
Or you could do it like every other rocketry startup: either succeed first time or go bankrupt. Hell, occasionally they go bankrupt after succeeding at their first flight.
People here act like SpaceX is the only or the best rocket startup. That trial-and-error is somehow the superior design strategy and that that is responsible for SpaceX's success.
In reality, of course, SpaceX's only real distinguishing feature is how much they blow up and how they keep getting funding despite financial analysis after financial analysis saying "this will never work, it's a loss". But no worries! Starlink will fix it! Except ... when calculating Starlink profits they're ... also negative. Starlink caused a huge boost in SpaceX funding, while losing money. How do you do that?
In my personal experience, creating a company that runs at a loss results in losing money. I guess SpaceX makes it up on volume?
SpaceX's secret is dollars. Investor dollars. The amount of money Musk has (frequently literally) more than the funding of EVERY other private rocket startup COMBINED.
2025 SpaceX launches carried payloads from outside customers only 43 times. Most of it from US govt. The launch market it simply tiny and not growing much.
Luckily SpaceX pivoted the narrative just in time to be an AI company, not a Space company. We'll see what the next narrative will be, if any.
My point was that working rockets is not exactly a good explanation for SpaceX's success.
Rocket Lab Electron works
Galactic Energy Ceres-1 works
Virgin Orbit LauncherOne rocket works
Astra Rocket 3.3 works (no relation to OpenAI)
Firefly AerospaceAlpha works
And this is disregarding that of course these are hardly the only kind of organization with working rockets. Did you know a rocket startup with working rockets was forced into bankruptcy for fear it might give Congo access to ballistic rockets?
... What makes the difference for SpaceX is investor money, not engineering excellence. In fact most of the above companies got to orbit on their first try, no blowing up rockets and hundreds of millions of dollars required.
No, Spacex is different because of engineering. By being able to reuse rockets they can launch frequently (every week?). By launching frequently they can measure and improve the rockets, so reliability goes up and price down.
Really? Do you realize how insane it is what you're saying? A "fully loaded" cost for a Falcon launch, including the cost of development and of course the debt SpaceX took on to get here, comes an eye-watering 2.9 BILLION dollars per launch (just shy of double the space shuttle's cost). Of that debt, Musk spent about 100 million per launch on materials, employees, development, ... and kept 2.8 billion per launch for himself and his investors (that's why it's such brilliant financial engineering, also that's how you become a trillionnaire). To just keep it's current valuation, SpaceX needs something close to 2000 launches per year, indefinitely, more than double their current pace. That market doesn't exist. There aren't enough people to pay for launching satellites to launch that many rockets. And ... that's disregarding that SpaceX has competitors that are ~2 years behind and don't have SpaceX debt load, and should be able to launch whatever you want in about 2 years at half SpaceX's $/kg.
Several of the already named startups had rockets that are reusable. You act like SpaceX is the origin, or the first working example of the idea of reusable rockets. They are not, and they are not a little bit short of that standard, but a reusable rocket flew to Space and landed over 60 years ago. SpaceX is an accounting/finance accomplishment, not an engineering accomplishment.
At this point in time, both Europe (Arianespace) and China (CASC) have bet money they can duplicate the effort, Europe at less than 1% of the money SpaceX spent. Of course they usually go to a little over 2 times their planned budget. In other words, should come out below 2.5% the budget SpaceX spent ... (but does that matter given that SpaceX is not profitable?)
The whole space shuttle program (where SpaceX got half its employees I might add) is not just an attempt at making reusable rocket motors work. It's a successful attempt at making reusable rockets work first try, in 1981 (first motor reuse 6 months later, same year).
The engines on the orbiter could be, and regularly were, reused. This was done on its first ever launch (and second, obviously). The first 3 engines that launched the first Space Shuttle Orbiter were reused. Now how's that for engineering? A class above SpaceX, with 50 years older tech?. Obviously those engines landed. And even the Space Shuttle program over it's entire life (30+ years) lost less engines to everything than SpaceX lost designing it's rocket before launching it's first rocket to orbit.
If you allow for pure demonstration flights you could even say the first demonstration of a reusable rocket launching to space (ie. above the 100km line) was NASA X-15 flight 90, by Joseph A. Walker on 19th July 1963. Joseph Walker landed that engine, and reused that very engine to do it again, by the way. Of course, that wasn't into orbit.
And one of the startups had a reusable rocket at its first ever launch too. All these efforts had problems. Yes NASA did this first try, but very expensively. The startup did it cheaper than SpaceX did (and it wasn't remotely close), but wasn't able to continue (lack of money). You could complain their rocket was way smaller, and didn't make it to orbit (made it to space though).
Critically, SpaceX engineering still falls into the "not good enough" category, as mean as that is to say. It does not have the kg/$ performance the market demands, and SpaceX is only destined for bankruptcy. Plus, given their debt load, it really can't take that long (let's say a decade, tops). Let me explain. There is a clear commercial standard, from the Iridium days. Replacing 4000 satellites in orbit every 5 years, forever, on the income you can get from such a network from subscriptions, is not commercially viable with SpaceX technology. And you could say, the math is clear: cheap enough only seems achievable with a "spaceplane" design, launching from an airstrip. That was the motivation for the Space Shuttle program, but they couldn't make that work. SpaceX uses 12000 satellites btw, so not only do they not solve the Iridium problem, they make it harder for themselves.
And despite your comment asserting the opposite, SpaceX isn't even trying (the cost curve "Spaceship" is on does not reach commercial viability, not that it would even matter given the debt load SpaceX has)
Oh and when it comes to Musk's usual promises vs performance? You know who launched a spaceship to Mars and who didn't? Blue Origin did. SpaceX did ... not.
There is no engineering axis, other than perhaps eventual scale, where SpaceX wins on the engineering.
And of course, Trump is really helping to destroy SpaceX by making it clear to Europe that access to SpaceX is contingent on Trump's seemingly somewhat unstable mood.
Their growth is insane. The operating income (not revenue which is double digits, but irrelevant) in 2025 was 4,4B and with the growth they have, they are profiting multiple billions a year.
First "breakeven cash flow" does not equal profit. But that's just Musk, as the CEO (and thus accountable for financial statements he makes to the SEC), cannot actually say profit.
More generally, never believe any kind of financial engineer when they say this. It's bullshit. Guaranteed. Why? Simple: if it was true, they would never tell you. They would take a shovel and put their own money in, they would charge large banks to let them put their money in (yes, seriously). They'd literally charge other rich people money to let them put their money in ... You would hear about it 20 years after the fact in an interview done after retirement, and only then.
Specifically, what's wrong here Starlink pays for it's own launches in stock (they pay by issuing stock to SpaceX). If you think about it, that's creating money out of nothing:
SpaceX holds Starlink debt, and counts that as assets (as a positive amount)
Starlink issues and "succesfully" sells shares to SpaceX, and counts that as income (as a positive amount)
So you see what's happening here: these are two positive numbers, but ... obviously have to sum to zero! After all if I buy an ice cream from you for 5$ the change in my assets and the change in your assets has to sum to zero (-5$ for me, +5$ for you = 0$ for both of us together). Not for SpaceX and Starlink. SpaceX gives rocket launches to Starlink and the sum of both their assets is billions!
If you look at actual cash flow, Starlink's last quarter was 4.4B operating income, minus 2.4B depreciation and amortization, minus 4.17B capital expenditures. How do you calculate the company worth? Easy capital expenditures are zero (because they "convert" capital to goods, which can be resold, except of course they can't really).
So for "total assets" on the financial statements that's 4.4B - 2.4B PLUS 4.17B per year.
For actual cash or resources, it's obviously 4.4B - 2.4B - 4.17B or MINUS 2 billion per year.
Which one is true depends on whether SpaceX can succesfully sell Starlink's shares at the internal valuation they're using. Obviously the safe accounting value is the one with the minus sign. Or to put it differently: Starlink has "increased in value" by 2 billion, so investors (for now SpaceX) need to give it 2 billion to continue operating.
In the trailer, there's this line: "When Musk says that the future of humanity is to colonize Mars, he is selling us dreams. That's not happening."
That irritates me a lot. Everything extremely difficult (or thought to be impossible) is a dream until someone (or some company) works hard on it and invests in it for a long time. Those that would criticize Musk & SpaceX for chipping away at this seem to be effectively saying "do not try."
Funny, for me it's the opposite: I get extremely irritated when Musk or someone else says the future of humanity is to colonize Mars. If you think you can turn a bare rock into a livable planet, please do something about Earth and global warming first.
It comes up every so often. If you're actually putting in enough effort to make a proper colony, and not e.g. McMurdo Station but colder and redder and the air's unbreathable even in summer and the soil's poison, then an artificial magnetosphere is not a huge additional cost.
It's way beyond what we can do right now, but then again, at time of writing Starship has yet to have been in a circular orbit, so all aspects of a Mars colony are way beyond what we can do right now.
Terraforming a planet is equal to EVs? Reversing, not just slowing, anthropogenic climate change needs a bit more than a green transition. And if you think Mars as is constitutes humanities future, spend a year at the South Pole. Without terraforming, it’ll be that, but far worse. If we can make that rock half way survivable, not even properly habitable, we’ll see those techniques applied closer to home long before.
He made an electric car the into the best selling car in the world, and is building the largest solar cell factory in the US. What more should he personally be doing about global warming?
No, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning did not make the Model Y. They left the company more than a decade before. Neither did they make the Model 3, nor the Model S before that. They didn't even make it to the first delivery of Tesla's first car, the Roadster. Your implication that they deserve credit for two decades' worth of Tesla's achievements after they left is plainly ridiculous.
LOL this comes up every single time. Tesla was nothing, it was a name and a plan. They had absolutely 0 and statistically would have never done anything.
Ya'll need to stop with what the founders accomplished pre-Musk.
I have never owned, nor have any desire to ever own a Tesla or any electric car yet, but this sideline war is amusing to see.
What else should the richest man on the planet be doing about global warming? Really? Dude literally had full access to the US government and…? Like… he could tweet on it to start?
This guy has actively sabotaged rail systems in multiple cities, how much of a negative impact has that had?
Let's just stop claiming he actually cares about the environment and that he just wants wealth and power and he saw a business opportunity taking over Tesla.
I wanted to say it could be argued his support for pro fossil fuel political candidate is hugely detrimental to the cause but then the war hiked oil price so much that this morning I saw a stat that shows global CO2 emission started to fall…
He did sell them, though how much this matters is more like "were CO2 permit trading prices set correctly?" rather than something to blame Musk for.
For me personally, things like this make me question the value of the businesses rather than the environment. Like, I'm not sure if it's true this year, but in several recent years you could correctly say Musk personally made more money selling Tesla shares than Tesla made lifetime net profit, and likewise could correctly say that if all government subsidies and artificial markets were removed Tesla would not have made a profit at all.
Carbon trading is the "free market" solution to getting businesses to price-in what would otherwise be a free externality.
I won't praise Musk for it (at best praise goes to the governments setting up the rules), so we're probably on the same page, but it did feel like you were painting him as a villain for taking part in something that at least solves one of the common criticisms of carbon emitting industries.
Not exactly, the "free market" solution would be a carbon tax. The distinction matters here - had Musk not sold Teslas offsets, those other businesses would have paid a higher (and more accurate) price.
It may feel like that because it takes away Musks "at least he built the Autobahn" (even though the statement is of course also inaccurate for the original). But I consider it very dishonest to assign CO2 savings from electric cars to him, without also mentioning him profiting off of those emissions in other places.
... as allowed and intended by our government, and using the proceeds to build the factories that allowed them to scale production to the point where the best-selling car in the world can be electric, which otherwise would have taken longer. Having served their purpose, these emissions credits are now going away.
They will be, as the faster scaling of electric car production means more emissions will be saved going forward, and there won't be any more emissions credits offsetting them. And Tesla sold cars in places without emissions credits too. I'm sure there were more than enough of those to offset the rockets with plenty left over.
But Tesla is one of America's roadblocks to scaling EV usage. They cancelled their $25,000 EV plans after the US blocked economic competitors like BYD from entering the US market. The ostensible goal of Tesla is not to reduce emissions through democratized EVs, but to protect their bottom-line and forcibly prevent competition from undermining their profits.
It's not Elon's fault the US put 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs. It's not even Trump's fault. Biden did it! You can't pin that on Elon.
Tesla isn't afraid of Chinese competition. They compete directly with BYD in China and win. Model Y outsells any BYD model. All other US automakers, on the other hand, are terrified. And for good reason.
Meanwhile, Tesla is still making a $25,000 EV. It's just not designed for personal ownership. Tesla is betting on autonomous fleets as the future of cars. But they're still electric. Shared fleets would be way more efficient than personal car ownership, so this is even better for the climate, actually.
And they're doing Semi and Megapack and Superchargers (open to all EVs) too. They're doing their own battery R&D at their own battery factory, their own lithium refining, their own solar cell production. Honestly ridiculous that you would try to paint Tesla as some kind of climate traitor.
BYD sells several times more different EV models in twice as many countries, yet it only totals 38% more EV units than Tesla (2025). What puts them in the top 10 is their non-EV sales, which Tesla doesn't do at all.
Cybertruck is a flop, no argument there.
The reason Tesla hasn't scaled further is that a few years ago they pivoted in strategy and are no longer heavily pursuing the consumer market with new models for personal ownership. For better or worse they are all in on autonomous fleet vehicles and Optimus. The pivot was probably a few years too early. Many think it'll never work and I'm sure you're among them, but time will tell.
Not aggressively pursuing future new consumer models is not the same thing as being a low volume manufacturer. Autonomous fleet vehicles are also not going to be low volume, either.
Model Y continues to have the highest production volume of any model in the world, and you want to call that low volume manufacturing? I'm done engaging here, have fun.
He is the man with a plan a certain ideology wants to see eradicated. His existence is a intro to what western society has missed out on while coasting on past success build by people like him. If you dislike him why not leave the west?
> Actually if you tank them with sustainable fuel..
Getting Starship to be useful for Mars missions requires actually building industrial-scale Sabatier machines.
This is something he has known about, and talked about, for a long time; it's (apparently) why they're designed around methane.
However, we don't see any reports of work on such machines.
This is both bad for the environment here on Earth, and also an indicator that despite what he's been saying, Mars has been less of an interest for several years before he officially put the moon and space data centres ahead of it.
Starmind may indeed be entirely a cynical ploy to get investors banging on his doors. I think this is the only sensible reason for it, even. I really need to make time to finish that blog post…
However, merely switching from Mars to the Moon isn't by itself a reason for the complete absence of any public presentations about progress with industrial-scale Sabatier machines.
There's a lot of good use for industrial-scale Sabatier machines right now, on Earth. Use renewables to synthesise methane, the main component of natural gas: (1) Hormuz less important; (2) those gas turbines powering his ground based data centres look a lot less bad (still bad, but less bad); (3) methane-fuelled rockets look a lot greener; (4) can sell to any nation with a lot of renewable supply that wants to get into petrochemicals (though I suppose "petro" is a misnomer if it's not from rocks…)
Like, it wouldn't be entirely nuts to say this is order-of a trillion dollar opportunity, if someone got it right. At least, assuming the same playbook as the SpaceX IPO for TAMs, which I absolutely do consider to look suspiciously like they gamed a metric that allows such gaming.
Colonizing the moon first is not a bad idea and ultimately we do need to find some way of (in the far future) mitigating the sun's expansion, whether it's moving to another planet or something
Mars is just really far. You can send lots of robots. Human beings is a tougher thing
"Mitigating the sun's expansion" is right up there with "bringing the unicorns back", in both plausibility and need. At least for the existence timeline of genus Homo.
There is a weird immature escapism involved in such sci fi story-telling. Most adults are capable of seeing that the biggest problems are internal. Inside ourselves, within families, and more broadly, on earth, itself. Hunger, injustice, the rise of dictators and those who have successfully subverted democracy, slavery and human trafficking. If he was supposedly as capable as his self-mythologizing claims ("Chess is an easy game; I won all games that I played"), he'd pick a much more earth-bound goal. Maybe reconcile with his estranged son-turned-daughter. How about that for starters? Or not get divorced for once? Is that possible for our self-confessed genius?
Musk's plan for the survival of the species, as far as I can tell, is to personally make as many (white) babies as possible. His talk of colonizing Mars is a pipe dream, a lure for gullible investors.
No one doubts that the work is difficult. The criticism, as the trailer makes clear in context, is not that the company is not making adequate progress, but rather that the public statements made by Musk about the progress of the company are not honest.
There are, I think, two things that the documentary is trying to do with this statement. The first is to remind people that even visionaries selling their actions on a noble cause must still be evaluated for the negative consequences of their actions. In this case, Musk is known to be the cause of quite a few deaths in the world thanks to things like eliminating USAID [1]. People like him need to be fairly evaluated not just on the good they might potentially unlock in the future, but the evil they are unlocking today.
The second thing is to point out that Musk may not be entirely honest about trying to colonize Mars, just as some politicians may campaign on a promise to make a country great again while robbing blind the rubes who vote for them.
[1] Although I think Mark Zuckerberg still beats him in the deadliest tech CEO race, given the role that Facebook plays in the Rohingya genocide.
I think the problem is more that people doubt Musk's sincerity. And I wonder, to be honest, how it’s possible not to. Musk is no Wright and no Bell. He should be placed in the same category as people like Bernie Madoff, Charles Ponzi, and Gregor MacGregor. But your perspective contains another flaw: In hindsight, we see the big, daring projects that were successful. What we don’t see are the countless projects that failed. That skews the cost-benefit analysis a bit. Especially since large projects have far-reaching, often negative side effects. You can admire Hannibal for his crossing of the Alps, but no sane person would want to be one of the many soldiers who froze to death in the process.
In 2008 Musk was selling a prototype Tesla Roadster with solar panels on the roof and promised a fully solar production vehicle would be available soon. They took deposits for it. I think people still have deposits on the Roadster in 2026.
You seem to be getting different cars mixed up, so what you're saying is factually wrong. Musk never promoted that, and Tesla did complete all of the orders for the original Roadster.
Even if you were correct on the facts, the right thing to do in the face of changing circumstances can of course be to change the plan. In an alternate reality where they had sold preorders for a solar car, making it right to the customers combined with not going out of business is the better plan.
I'm not trying to insult anyone. It's only an observation of repeated patterns. Please share the solar powered Roadster deliveries. I'm not going to try to source ~20 year old marketing from Musk / Tesla. I can tell you: I thought it was awesome, I was skeptical of the solar powered promise, and it never was delivered. (or maybe it was if you can share some evidence.)
I get annoyed by this type of comment because Musk is obviously an over the top hype man, he sees this as his job. And he has a long history of crazy predictions that didn't come true. Any other CEO spouts some obvious marketing bs and people are appropriately cynical but Musk's defenders just really want to believe.
What are some of the most egregious examples from his long history of crazy predictions?
Most of the examples I've ever seen tend to be purposeful misunderstanding, his timing being off (clearly a flaw, but common to most ambitious projects), vibes, or just factually incorrect.
He clearly has flaws, but his critics always seem to be far more flawed.
They are chipping away but their real motive is not mars colonization; that is a story designed to serve the venture capital needs of here and now.
That's the truth and that is what is being said here; it is not a denial that the chipping away is happening, it is a characterization of the why and how.
He's not trying to colonize mars, he's trying to get power and wealth and for you to like him. Nothing irks this man more than someone who doubts he is a saviour. It is reasonable to demand we fix the planet we currently inhabit, rather than believe a ketamine-addict that the better solution is to just let it go to hell and move on.
If he wants power, wealth and fans then he could retire already because that would be mission accomplished. It seems that there is some other motivation.
Depends on why you think the Vision Pro is so expensive. Maybe they just wanted extremely thick margins and to not sell many, but I'm guessing that they were actually trying. They could have called it a dev kit, but the indications are that they are trying to sell to consumers.
> You shall not use the Materials for any commercial purpose without obtaining a separate commercial license from us.
It probably will be much cheaper to use than other image models, but it seems that will be up to the whims of Qwen/Alibaba rather than just being the cost of putting it in a cloud provider.
Honestly, that's fine. The commercial license isn't that bad, and cloud providers selling API access to this can afford it.
I am just happy I can run these models on my own hardware. Hopefully in 10 years, self-hosted models far exceeding what's currently available will run comfortable on commodity hardware.
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