And that's one of the (many) frustrating things with Musk: he fairly consistently overpromises and underdelivers. Even if that underdelivering is better than what you can get elsewhere, it still leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
It definitely does, although I don't understand why.
One thing making bold forecasts does is motivate your people. JFK told us we'd get to the moon this decade which is absolutely nuts. Would we have got there as soon if he had said we'd get to the moon eventually?
To the other responder: JFK also had no tangible justification to say we'd get there so soon, and the most likely outcome was that he was going to be wrong. Does that make him a pathological liar?
Maybe because it's a kind of lying, and people who do it on a regular basis are untrustworthy people?
> JFK told us we'd get to the moon this decade which is absolutely nuts.
Remember that he didn't phrase it as "we will do this", he phrased it as "this is our goal". He referred to it as a goal we're choosing, not as an inevitability.
Musk isn't goal-setting, he's making promises. The difference between the two is critical. One is being a leader, the other is being a liar.
In general, they don't seem to get as much negative attention in the media, and I'm guessing that's because they pay a fair bit for advertising.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_swit...
Almost every manufacturer's claims about EV production, range, etc.
Almost every manufacturer's claims about how hard and expensive it would be to add different safety features and/or fuel efficiency improvements.
A simple search for more information provides this. Kennedy asked Johnson to consult with NASA.
Johnson consulted with officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Its new administrator, James E. Webb, told him that there was no chance of beating the Russians to launching a space station, and he was not certain that NASA could orbit a man around the Moon first, so the best option would be to attempt to land a man on the Moon. This would also be the most expensive option; Webb believed it would require $22 billion (equivalent to $166 billion in 2022) to achieve it by 1970. Johnson also consulted with Wernher von Braun; military leaders, including Lieutenant General Bernard Schriever; and three business executives: Frank Stanton from CBS, Donald C. Cook from American Electric Power, and George R. Brown from Brown & Root.
JFK was stating an experts opinion in a speech not spitballing random estimates that were changing yearly in order to make him and the US seem awesome.
And certainly there's a "pile on" element as well. Musk is, to put it mildly, a controversial character in general. It's easier to take someone you already don't like, and criticize them more harshly for other faults than you would for someone (like JFK, perhaps) that you otherwise generally like. Maybe that's not fair, but it seems pretty human-nature-y.
Another point: is there a way to make bold forecasts in order to motivate your employees, without making it feel like a promise to your customers? If so, Musk generally fails at that.
Can we please just call it what it really is? Lying. He's a pathological liar.
No one can predict the future. Musk is what plenty of entrepreneurs are...over-confident. That's part of the profile. That doesn't make him or any of them liars.
> Musk is what plenty of entrepreneurs are...over-confident
The real world describing this is delusional. Which I don't think he is (or was at that point anyway).
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, simply asking you to show me the space you speak of.
Really? You don't see anything between "we're certain to fail" and "were going to accomplish this thing (even though we haven't got the slightest clue how) in X months"? Would you feel differently about it if Musk said they'll do it in 3 weeks? Because I don't, besides "6 months" being slightly easier to believe.
2) Musk is particularly bad about it & does it in places that directly financially benefit him.
Telling people that if they fork out 15k now they'll have full self driving in X timeline, completely missing it and then doing the exact same thing for years on end seems less like the planning fallacy and more like fraud, but I guess we can just wait to see what the courts decide on the matter
He's not one though. He's a business executive, so someone who in theory who would have the job to reconcile those lofty dreams with reality.
However, I'd bet quite a bit that the actual engineers and software developers were that optimistic and certainly didn't believe they could achieve FSD in 6 months (they'd be horrible incompetent engineers if they actually believed that).