Elon Musk’s timelines are meaningless

"I feel very confident predicting autonomous robotaxis for Tesla next year," Elon Musk told investors way back in 2019. He said basically the same thing to investors last night. Five years later. In 2024.

“I would be shocked if we cannot do it next year,” he said during the latest earnings call, referring to when Tesla would finally have unsupervised full-self driving capabilities and, by extension, the first robotaxi ride.

In April, Musk said he’d unveil the robotaxi on August 8 (8/8). On the earnings call, after Bloomberg had already reported as much, he updated that to October 10 (10/10). Don’t be shocked if that date passes us by, too, and becomes December 12 (12/12). After all, it would only require solving a notoriously complex product that has significant limitations in its current iteration, along with clearing immense regulatory hurdles.

Yesterday’s official earnings presentation read, “Though timing of Robotaxi deployment depends on technological advancement and regulatory approval, we are working vigorously on this opportunity given the outsized potential value.” Presumably, the lawyers and not Musk wrote that.

In addition to robotaxis and the long-awaited — and delayed — unsupervised full self-driving functionality, yesterday Musk told us to expect a lot of other things next year:

• The eagerly anticipated second generation Roadster

• An AWS-like distributed computing network made out of Teslas

• “Several thousand Optimus robots produced and doing useful things”

• An affordable Tesla

This is not the first time he’s wildly underestimated a production timeline and it probably won’t be the last. He does it all the time. There are supercuts of him promising things like robotaxis or full self driving “next year” for years on end.

Musk continuously puts out wildly incorrect timelines only to walk them back. It sounds good and gets investors excited. It even makes them forgive a bad earnings season. Or four.

So-called “safe harbor” provisions may shield executives from running afoul of the law when it comes to making forward-looking statements, provided sufficient boilerplate disclaimers have been made.

He’ll probably keep doing it as long as investors don’t really hold him to his word. But perhaps they’re starting to. Tesla stock is down 8% premarket.