Elon Musk Talks a Lot

Elon Musk, the South African businessman who started his first venture with money he got from his wealthy father, has made predictions. We would suggest that he is well-known for making predictions, which have been cataloged in depth. Unfortunately, like Nostradamus, Musk is not known for making accurate predictions. It is, in fact, our venerable opinion that Musk talks a big game, but otherwise says a lot of things that make clear what he actually is: an idiot who doesn’t know much of anything at this point, and refuses to educate himself or shut up.

Let’s review.

“We will have full self driving!”

First prediction: 2013

Musk has said some variation of this for more than a decade, usually with qualifiers like “less than two/three years”, “next year”, “later this year”, and so on. He also likes to say that he feels very confident about this prediction. To date, we do not have full self driving. What we do have are Waymos that can be defeated by putting a traffic cone on their hood, Tesla’s repeated misrepresentations of their safety data, and the fact that Tesla were recently sued to stop them from calling their self-driving system “Autopilot”.

This is the low-hanging fruit of the Elon Musk Quote List; the one that most people know well enough, and have heard often enough, that they don’t actually believe it anymore. (We hope.) It is so well known, in fact, that a lawsuit brought against Tesla regarding Musk’s FSD claims was dismissed on the bases that his statements were “corporate puffery”.

“We will make a train with rockets that will go from New York to LA in 45 minutes!”

First prediction: 2013

Ah, the Hyperloop. This was certainly one of Musk’s more bizarre ideas, and one where even a glance by us, the peons who claim no train expertise, reveals how nonsensical it is. An elevated train, you say? In a pressurized tube? Traveling at hundreds of miles an hour? Powered by solar panels? And we are not actually watching an episode of the latest popular sci-fi series du jour?

We believe everyone can take insight from the case of the Concorde supersonic passenger jet, sadly retired in 2003. It was an incredible feat of engineering that, unlike the Hyperloop, actually delivered on its promise of getting passengers from New York to London in under four hours. Sadly, it was also simply not necessary in an age where video calling, emails, and the modern Internet exists. And so for all Musk’s bluster about how much faster and, dare we say, “cooler” the Hyperloop is over regular trains, there is no actual working Hyperloop system in operation anywhere in the world today.

“We will send humans to Mars!”

First prediction: 2016

Musk initially started SpaceX out of a desire to get to Mars, then quickly realized that getting to Mars is actually pretty difficult if you want to survive the experience. (We cannot comment on whether he understands that actually being on Mars would be unpleasant at best and straight up fatal at worst; like being on the International Space Station, but without the fun of zero-G and with infinitely more risk.) He is on record as saying he wants to live and die on Mars, so there is that.

Musk was oh-so-confident that it would be possible to start sending people to Mars as early as 2024. That, of course, has not happened, and any semblance of its possibility has been debunked by experts who know what they’re talking about and who can say with authority that Musk doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“We will have robot servants!”

First prediction: 2022

We are certain in our opinion that Musk is living out the fantasies of his 10-year-old self with the Optimus robot, if only because its name is “Optimus”, and Transformers were huge when he was a kid in the 1980s. (The animated movie came out in 1986 when he was 15, for the record.) See also: everything to do with the Cybertruck and why it looks as goofy as it does.

The idea of humanoid robots is essentially space opera, never mind science fiction. Robots in humanoid shape, at the current level of technology, are a very inefficient design, especially considering that we have actual humans around who are superior in almost every way. Yes, humans are messy meat creatures filled with inconvenient things like emotions and opinions, but they are versatile, adaptable, and available in a way that robots are not. Musk has said much about how the Optimus robot will be able to do unspecified tasks around the home, and Tesla would aim to produce 10 million robots a year. To date, plenty of actual robotics experts have spoken out and said that Musk, once again, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“We have entered the singularity!”

First prediction: 2026

Allow us a little fun, dear readers, for we can claim some knowledge of the workings of what is commonly called artificial intelligence, and this caused us to chuckle into our morning coffee.

Some background: the so-called singularity refers to a concept from the mid-20th century where the development of self-improving artificial intelligence causes a run-away effect of greater and faster technological advancement, outside of human control, which results in massive upheaval and the possible destruction of human civilization. Think “The Matrix” and all its sequels/spin-offs, but without Keanu Reeves.

We find it somewhat strange that so many AI maximalists focus on this particular version of the future, where super-intelligent computers decide to eradicate all the meatbags, and not, say, on the future posited by Iain M. Banks in the Culture novels, where humans live in a utopia and are effectively the pets of said super-intelligent computers.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), the singularity requires the existence of artificial intelligence that is actually… intelligent, and capable of human-level reasoning. Everything that is currently being called an AI system is not, in fact, that. ChatGPT, Claude, Deepseek, Gemini; all these supposed AIs that talk back as if they are a person are not reasoning. They are highly advanced pattern-matching scripts, answering only a single question with every prompt: given this input, what is the most likely output? They have no understanding or context for what the input really is, or whether the output is actually correct or even sane. They cannot self-improve because they have no concept of being better or worse. They are a more advanced version of a Skyrim NPC, nothing more.

That Musk looks at the output of Grok (we presume he is using his own company’s AI of course) and believes that it is an intelligent being as opposed to a fancy computer script should make it clear that, once again, he does not know what he’s talking about when it comes to AI.

In conclusion

If we were so inclined to listen to grandiose claims about the future of technology, dear readers, we have so many more interesting and plausible options than Elon Musk, a man who can command the attention of many due to having obscene wealth and not because he has anything of worth to say. Rest assured that we will update this list as and when he opines on the next subject that takes his fancy.

(Note: we did not reach out to Elon Musk for comment, as we do not care about his opinion on this piece.)