Musk and the tricky carrots

The New York Times has made a striking deployment: it has dedicated itself to analyzing the 602 times Elon Musk has made one of his fabulous promises and has set a date for them. It turns out that only in 19% of cases has he met the announced deadlines. This does not mean that the rest are failures, because there are projections for years to come, but the report sheds light on an interesting pattern: that of the promising technological carrot that is dangled in front of people's noses. And what we should ask ourselves is why he makes this profusion of projections that no one demands of him. The answer is that all the wealth of the richest man in the world is not based on assets that have a concrete value, but rather, in reality, when his fortune is calculated – and publicized – what is done is a calculation of the value of his companies. And this value is never an analysis of present-day assets, but fundamentally estimates of the future. Now that he is preparing for the IPO of SpaceX, the 1.8 trillion dollars he aspires to be valued at are, fundamentally, expectations.

For this reason, the New York Times report, beyond the striking exercise, seeks to portray him as a charlatan. Without denying his business and cultural impact, Elon Musk's main merit has been to trick the planet with all sorts of dreams that, as the deadlines he set fall by the wayside, it becomes evident that they were chimeras. At the beginning of 2025, we were supposed to reach Mars to refound humanity there and thus have a backup planet. The reality is that we are not even capable of getting home from the Primavera Sound in a minimum condition of dignity and in a reasonable time. All this shaking of expectations is practiced with great success by the big tech companies – how is Zuckerberg doing with the metaverse? – and it is certainly journalistic work to dismantle them. This is also the scrutiny of power.