By now, everyone knows that Elon Musk is very much an optimist when it comes to making predictions.
That’s the nice way to put it. To be blunt, Musk is a “bullshit artist.” He makes promises he can’t keep. For example, everyone now is likely very familiar with his infamous 2011 interview with the Wall Street Journal where he said he’d put a man on Mars in 10 years. That was 14 years ago now and we’re nowhere near putting anyone on Mars. Years ago, Musk also touted his proposed Hyperloop train system as a way to quickly transport people between cities; that never came to fruition and was likely a ruse to stop other transit projects.
With 2025 nearly over, Mashable decided to revisit his predictions related to this year. Time has run out. What did Musk promise for this year that didn’t come to fruition?
People on Mars by 2025
Yes, I just mentioned that 2011 Wall Street Journal interview where Musk promised to put a man on Mars in 10 years. However, this one is a completely separate promise from Musk regarding a man on Mars.
Back in 2016 — roughly four years after his 10-year WSJ claim — Musk made an appearance during Recode’s Code 2016 conference. During a conversation with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, Musk pushed back his previous Mars arrival prediction that placed humans on the red planet by 2021. According to Musk, SpaceX would start sending rockets to Mars by 2018, followed by a new Mars mission every 26 months, and then they’d start sending people.
“If things go according to plan, we should be able to launch people probably in 2024 with arrival in 2025,” Musk said, referring to colonists arriving on the planet.
Nope — 2025 has come and gone and we’re still not on Mars.
NASA Mars rover captures crackling lightning. Hear the ‘thunder’ yourself.
Tesla robotaxis would cover half of the U.S. population
Take a walk outside. How many Tesla robotaxis do you see? None, you say? And you say you live in Austin, Texas – the only place in the U.S. where robotaxis are currently operating?
That’s odd. Because in July, during Tesla’s Q2 quarterly financial report, Musk told investors that Tesla’s robotaxis would be serving half of the nation.
“I believe half of the population of the US will be covered by Tesla’s robotaxi by the end of the year,” Musk said.
Obviously, that’s not true. And a new report from the New York Times last week found that even Austin locals rarely, if ever, came across Tesla’s robotaxis.
As the EV outlet Electrek pointed out at the time of his claim, it was preposterous for Musk to make. Yet, he made the claim with a straight face and investors believed him.
Fully driverless Tesla robotaxis
Speaking of Tesla’s robotaxis, if you do come across one, did you know you’ll actually find a human safety monitor riding inside? You will, despite what Musk previously promised.
“Teslas will be in the wild with no one in them, in June in Austin,” Musk said last year in a 2024 Q4 earnings call. “This is not some far-off mythical situation, it’s five, six months away.”
While Tesla’s robotaxi service did arrive in Austin during that timeline, they weren’t “with no one in them.” The level of autonomy that Tesla’s performs at requires a human safety monitor to ride inside the vehicle, according to Texas regulations.
But, Musk promised multiple times over the past few months that those human safety monitors would be removed by the end of 2025.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Musk said so in a post in September on X.
“The safety driver is just there for the first few months to be extra safe,” Musk said. “Should be no safety driver by end of year.”
Mashable Light Speed
Musk reiterated that schedule during an earnings call in October.
“We are expecting to have no safety drivers in at least large parts of Austin by the end of this year, so within a few months,” Musk said.
And then Musk repeated that claim in early December during an xAI hackathon.
“Unsupervised is pretty much solved at this point,” stated Musk. “So there will be Tesla robotaxis operating in Austin with no one in them. Not even anyone in the passenger seat in about three weeks.”
Last week, Musk posted that he had taken a ride in a fully driverless Tesla robotaxi in Austin. A Tesla employee shared a video from inside a driverless ride as well. However, these appear to be test runs as regular customers still report human safety monitors are still part of the ride, as least as of very late December.
xAI would achieve AGI
Artificial general intelligence or AGI is basically the holy grail for the current AI-obsessed tech industry. AGI can be defined as the type of artificial intelligence that we were promised in sci-fi movies. It’s not a large language model that can sound human, like existing AI, but AI that can actually perform intellectual tasks just like a human. It can think, learn, reason, and take action.
In 2024, in a reply on his social media platform X, Musk said his AI company xAI would achieve AGI in 2025.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
“How long until AGI?” posted Logan Kilpatrick of Google AI Studio.
“Next year,” Musk replied.
“Big if true,” Kilpatrick responded.
Well, surprise. It wasn’t true.
According to a new report from Business Insider, Musk has since moved the goalposts and says xAI could achieve AGI in the next few years and potentially even by next year! We’ll report back at the end of 2026 unless Musk’s version of Skynet has taken over.
A flying car / demo of the long-awaited Tesla Roadster
This is a combo of two potential promises, as it’s still unclear what the heck Musk was actually referring to on Joe Rogan’s podcast back in November.
During an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, Musk claimed that Tesla would drop a demo of the long-awaited Roadster, a vehicle which the company announced and started taking preorders for in 2017. The Tesla Roadster has still yet to be released eight years later.
“We’re getting close to demonstrating the prototype,” Musk said to Rogan during the show. “I think this will be…one thing I can guarantee is that this product demo will be unforgettable.”
When pressed for a timeline from Rogan, Musk replied “hopefully before the end of the year.”
However, Musk went further, recalling how his “friend” Peter Thiel would say that the future was supposed to have flying cars, yet we don’t have flying cars. Rogan questioned Musk further but Musk just hinted that Thief should be able to buy a flying car and we’d all just have to wait to see the demo.
So, was Musk saying that the Roadster can fly? Was Musk even being serious about the flying car? Who knows. But, 2025 is now over and we don’t have a demo of a flying car or a Roadster so Musk didn’t deliver on either.
DOGE would cut $2 trillion in ‘waste, fraud and abuse’
Following Donald Trump’s reelection, Musk was given the chance to head up a new quasi-government agency called DOGE in which he pledged to cut $2 trillion in what he described as “waste, fraud and abuse.”
DOGE quickly became quite controversial as Musk and his very young team struggled to find any real “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government. Many of DOGE’s claims of fraud were debunked and the group had a penchant for posting inaccurate data which put the group in a more favorable light.
Musk’s promise of $2 trillion in cuts quickly became a promise of $1 trillion in cuts. That $1 trillion promise? That soon was rounded down further to the hundreds of billions.
Now, new analysis from the New York Times as well as the right-wing CATO Institute, found that DOGE actually didn’t save anything. Many of the government contacts that DOGE claimed to cancel are still active. In fact, government spending actually went up on DOGE’s watch.
“The federal government spent $7.6 trillion in the first 11 months of calendar year 2025, approximately $248 billion higher by November of 2025 compared to the same month in 2024,” the CATO Institute’s analysis said.
While Musk failed to deliver on his DOGE promises, the cuts it did actually make to USAID and foreign aid programs have reportedly led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Happy new year?
This article reflects the opinions of the author.
