Maybe someone should tell Elon that there are Tesla owners who are patiently waiting to join and can't get in? He seems to think that Tesla owners can just join whenever they want:
Yeah, I hadn't really considered this, but it actually is a plausible explanation. Perhaps there really is some miscommunication going on, and Elon and/or other people in charge of FSD Beta at some higher level don't actually understand that the software hasn't gone out at all to the many thousands waiting in the queue in the US the past ~4-5 months.
It seems very unlikely, but it is
plausible.
Most likely everyone in his normal orbit (employees, friends, whatever) who owns a Tesla is already in the beta. Maybe whomever's managing the queue sends regular reports upstream (about beta-enrollment stats, intervention stats, etc) on a regular basis, but they're being misinterpreted by those above who read them, who then incorrectly infer that new entrants are still actually getting FSD Beta firmware all this time? ("Oh! I thought that stat meant FSD Beta testers were expanding, but it's actually just the queue that's expanding?").
I don't think (from what I've trawled on the topic, anyways) that we really have any direct confirmation that Elon is aware of the issue. We *do* see that he ignores relevant twitter questions about when more US drivers will get it, but it could be the case that he's ignoring them because he misunderstands what they're really asking about and thinks the question is about the possible future, wider, non-safety-score rollout of beta?
If only they had a very small team that was paid to manage communications with customers...