Musk has lot of bold goals, but how many has he achieved?

from Seattle Times

Musk has lot of bold goals, but how many has he achieved?
Whether it’s 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 world’s 
first trillionaire. (Victor J. Blue / Bloomberg)
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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 SpaceX’s 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, Musk’s 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.

Musk’s ability to follow through on what he says is increasingly in the 
spotlight with SpaceX’s 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 Musk’s 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 
company’s $1.3 trillion market capitalization relies largely on his 
future plans, according to analyst estimates.

“The market is trading and selling on what he is saying,” Skyy Moore, a 
corporate lawyer who has reviewed Tesla’s financial filings, said of Musk.

The Times analyzed more than 69,000 of Musk’s 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 Tesla’s 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 Musk’s 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.

“He does set these really ambitious goals, because in his words, he 
wants quantum change, and you don’t get quantum change asking for 
incremental growth,” said Jon McNeill, Tesla’s 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 “full 
self-driving,” the company’s program for vehicles that can drive 
themselves without human intervention. Reaching this is important to 
Tesla’s status as the world’s most valuable car company, especially as 
its car sales have declined since 2023.

Over 60 of Musk’s more than 600 goals were related to the autonomous 
driving technology, which includes Tesla’s robotaxi program. Musk first 
promised the technology in 2016, according to The Times’ 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 “ability to achieve lofty out-year objectives.” 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.

“I wish it were otherwise,” he said in an investor call in April.

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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 “multiplanetary.”

He has made goals related to Mars 19 times, according to The Times’ 
analysis. But in his comments, Musk’s 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 “worst 
case 15 to 20 years.” He appeared undaunted that Mars is about 140 
million miles from Earth, with an inhospitable climate and terrain. Musk 
decorated SpaceX’s 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 “Occupy Mars” T-shirts.

Over the past decade, Musk made progress toward getting to Mars. In 2016 
he talked about plans for a “Mars Colonial Transporter,” 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 Musk’s deadlines for reaching Mars keep shifting, which 
became particularly noticeable in recent years. In March 2024, he said 
Starship would arrive on Mars “within five years.” A year later, he said 
the spaceship would depart for Mars “at the end of next year.”

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 “20+ years.” 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 Musk’s who has informally 
advised him on Mars, as well as other people close to the tech mogul.

“He has become, in recent years, not too careful about how close his 
remarks are to the truth,” Zubrin said.

Methodology: The New York Times analyzed Elon Musk’s 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 “promises,” 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.