Self-driving cars? Human colonies on Mars? Sadly, I have to admit that I was taken in by Elon Musk’s bullshit a decade ago. I told my kids that they’d probably not even need a driver’s license by the time they were eligible. I thought maybe I had a chance of visiting Mars before I shuffled off this mortal coil.
To be fair, I was an easy mark: I’m a science fiction nerd, and Musk was selling the future. And I wasn’t the only one taken in: as the years rolled by, Elon Musk went from eccentric ideas man who made some money off PayPal, to the richest person in the world (probably in history), with a net worth at the time of writing of around $850 billion due to increasing investment and growing share prices of his companies by other believers. (To get a grip on how insane that number is: that would allow someone to spend $1 million a day from the time of Cleopatra until today, and still leave a hundred billion in change.)
Ironically though, as the years went by and Musk’s wealth and power grew, the deadlines for his predictions of when these futures would arrive kept passing by without result. He’d then offer up another date a year or two in the future, which news organizations would again excitedly report on…and then that date too would pass. And so on, and so on.
I made excuses for these missed predictions. ‘Sometimes you need an over-excited, blue-sky genius leading the more pragmatic engineering team to achieve great things’, I would tell people, pointing at the growth of electric vehicles and reusable rockets as some worthy ‘side effects’ of Musk’s failed predictions.
But there were regular signs that I shouldn’t be defending Musk. Flaws in his character and his propensity for misleading information became obvious, such as when he called one of the divers in the 2018 Thai cave rescue ‘pedo’. That insult itself came after Musk was rebuked for using the crisis as a PR stunt, when he offered the nonsensical ‘solution’ of building a mini-sub to save the trapped children. At the beginning of the COVID pandemic in March 2020 he predicted there would be “zero new cases” within 2 months. When Tesla unveiled its Optimus robots in 2024, it allowed people to think the robots were autonomous when they were in fact teleoperated by humans. (And the list goes on: see the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast’s eye-opening four-part series Elon Musk Unmasked for a comprehensive debunking of the Musk mythos.)
However, the mask eventually slipped enough for me to see that Elon Musk was a deeply problematic person, not least as he began regularly hoisting himself by his own petard through his own words on his personally owned social media website, X.com (formerly Twitter). We made the decision to leave that website back in 2023 due to Musk’s bigoted views – a couple of years before he threw a literal Nazi salute during Donald Trump’s inauguration party.
It was clear: Elon Musk wasn’t actually a genius who kept missing his prediction dates for new tech because he was over-excited; he was just full of shit. The predictions were marketing lies, meant to excite investors and juice the stock price of his companies. Elon Musk is basically the monorail guy from The Simpsons.
It’s a play that other tech tycoons have joined in on in recent years, with the selling of artificial intelligence as likely to become conscious any second now if we just pump enough investment dollars into their companies, and cryptocurrency as the replacement for fiat currency so you better get in quick, despite Bitcoin having been around now for almost 20 years and still being perfectly useless for buying things.
It has become overwhelmingly apparent that the sci-fi predictions of the tech tycoons are almost completely a blend of wishful/uneducated thinking and completely intentional marketing to hype their companies and maintain share price growth…and thus grow their own personal wealth.
And to be fair, it’s working out great for them. Despite exposing themselves over the past couple of years as being the most obnoxious, bigoted man-babies alive, and their predictions of a science fiction future looking very shaky indeed, their (literal) stocks have continued to soar as investors continue to pump money into their companies and schemes.
But every grift must eventually be exposed, and it truly feels like we are now in the endgame of the tech hype bubble. And I’m not talking about how over-investment in AI is looking increasingly silly and dangerous. I’m talking about how the tech billionaires now have to predict patently ridiculous bullshit in order to stay ahead of the game – bullshit of a level that investors cannot ignore if they value their money.
Take Elon Musk for example, who in just the last few weeks alone has said humanoid robots will be doing surgeries within 3 years, that he’s going to create AI data centres in space using a million satellites manufactured on the Moon that will be yeeted into orbit by a lunar catapult, and indeed, even that the ‘Singularity’ itself will occur this year. We’ll be a Kardashev Scale 2 civilization soon everyone! (We’re not even a 1 yet)
If you believe Tesla’s robots will be doing human surgeries in 3 years, I have a bridge to sell you. AI data centres in space are a non-starter. And as for a million data center satellites manufactured on the Moon? Let’s ask a space security expert:
Despite being almost a trillionaire, Musk’s latest pronouncements smell of desperation. For the last couple of decades he’s been smart enough to string people along, with his failed predictions seeming at least plausible to still occur within an extended window, allowing for continued suspension of disbelief by the public and tech media. But these latest predictions jump the robotic shark: no intelligent person could take them seriously.
Instead, they seem like a sign of a bullshit artist reaching the end of his grift. Tesla sales are tanking and the company’s position is being overtaken by the likes of BYD, and as a result Musk and his high-profile investors have in recent months been very outspoken in trying to pivot Tesla from being seen as a car company to instead being seen as a robotics and AI company. Tesla has somehow maintained an extremely high share price compared to the amount of profit it can actually generate (which itself is falling), so Musk needs to excite investors with a new science fiction future that is just around the corner, like self-driving cars were previously. Hence Musk’s bullshit about robotic surgeries and a robot in every home by 2030.
To cover the huge ongoing bills of his AI company, Musk has also all of sudden merged it with one of his other privately held companies, SpaceX (after xAI had also previously merged with Twitter/X). He aims to take SpaceX public later this year, looking to consolidate and grow his wealth even further by generating public excitement about our science fiction future just around the corner in space technology (despite having to jettison that science fiction prediction of a Mars colony he’s been relying on to do the same thing for the past decade!). Hence Musk’s bullshit about factories on the Moon catapulting AI data centre satellites into space.
This, surely, should be the point at which investors, and the general public at large, realise that Elon Musk is always on the make, always selling the next big thing, without ever really making it happen? But then, I’ve been thinking this same thing for quite a few years now – surely no-one would invest in a guy who throws a Nazi salute, or has more than a decade of failed predictions?
But as David Burbach says, that doesn’t seem to be the logic of the world anymore, where the rule now seems to just be “the bigger the ludicrous factor the more stonk go up.” Maybe investors just aren’t smart enough to understand how much bullshit is being peddled right now, and any tech guy with a big enough reputation can get away with saying the most balls-out ridiculous science fiction nonsense and investors will just eat it up because of their inability to understand the reality of the situation.
Or maybe the entire technology market is now built on such a large amount of bullshit that the kayfabe must be maintained lest it collapse and bury us all under its stinking mass. Perhaps soon we’ll have promises of teleporters, faster-than-light spacecraft and nano-healing bots by 2028 by Musk and his tech tycoon colleagues, and the market will continue to throw money at their bigoted, selfish asses as these deadlines are continually missed, extended, and then eventually discarded.
Or maybe, we’re finally about to see a reckoning. It won’t be pleasant, but the sooner it happens, the better for us all.
