This is a BS excuse. Everyone in a professional settings knows that they need to evaluate the likelihood of their partners meeting their promises when planning ahead.
Not a direct response to you schonelucht, but more my musings on the growing frustration on this thread with Elon's ability/inability to meet his own timelines.
Most of us have seen the failure of both professional and personal relationships because one party is unreliable. I fully agree that we need to be able to base our decisions and plans on what people tell us. Elon knows this. Even though Elon is very careful to clarify that his aspirational goals are NOT promises, he knows he pays a toll when he misses these targets.
Some people think that Elon is careless with these "aspirational" goals; I do not see it that way. After GM's EV-1 debacle, most people had lost hope that the auto industry would produce an efficient alternative to ICE; we were teased with BEVs, but only reaching scale "in 20 years." Most of us were convinced that legacy auto, in conjunction with big oil, had no near-term plans for sustainability. Similarly, after the Apollo era, the world almost completely lost interest in space, in large part b/c we lost confidence in NASA; its goals were so far in the future so as to become meaningless. Elon planned the 'greenhouse on Mars' idea because, as he said, he "thought we had lost the will to explore. But I was wrong. People did not think there was a way. If people do not think there is a way, then they'll give up." I am fairly certain that this conclusion of Elon's has affected his approach to both SpaceX and to Tesla. Success requires not only a viable engineering solution for reusable rockets and for BEVs, but it also requires the ability to convince people that there is hope - that there is a way to bring these plans to fruition. People need to be able to see a path to success. A crewed mission to Mars "in the 2030s" or a mass market zero emission vehicle in "two decades" are non-starters.
Bears liken Elon to PT Barnum. I prefer a comparison with a controversial historical figure with a more positive connotation, Winston Churchill. Churchill had a brief window of opportunity at the beginning of WWII to fan the British political will to fight against seemingly overwhelming odds. Like Churchill, Elon's optimism is intended to stir people, not to deceive them.
I think that it is not unreasonable to view 'sustainable energy' and 'humanity as spacefaring civilization' as being of potential existential import. Just as Churchill had a brief window in which to succeed, Elon has repeatedly voiced his belief that there may only be a brief time in history in which to tackle energy and space travel, before political or economic or natural factors close that window of opportunity.
It is within this high-stakes context that Elon functions. He leads businesses that he feels address potential existential threats. In order to compete with legacy-auto, big-oil and aerospace industries, he needs to convince people (engineers and consumers alike) that "there is a way." If he is too timid, he cannot harness the latent enthusiasm in people. Conversely, as has been pointed out, if he becomes viewed as completely unreliable, he will eventually lack the support necessary to succeed. I believe that he is aware of this peril on either side. Certainly, as many others have noted, optimism is both Elon's strength as well as his Achilles heel. To temper the potential downside of that innate optimism, Elon is unusually intelligent and has an unusual ability to 'see into the future' in order to time his various endeavors (to use the Gretsky aphorism, "skating to where the puck will be").
I do not discount the frustration with Elon's track record of meeting his own goals. It is an all-too-present danger. I see that. But it is my opinion that Elon is shrewd, and he weighs this danger against the others. Ray Dalios, referring to our current social and economic situation, posed a question to his fellow panelists at Davos this month: if the balance is very difficult for central banks and the fed to get right, would you rather err on the side of letting the economy run a little too hot, or err on the side of raising rates too fast (with the implicit risks of social disorder in an increasingly populist world climate)? I suspect that Elon views his optimism a little like an economic stimulus package - tone it down too far, and the machine enters a negative feedback loop (I recognize that the converse is also true). A number of times he has sheepishly prefaced his aspirational goals by saying things like, 'I don't have a very good track record on this.' But he chooses to err on the optimistic side because it is this hope that keeps him going. Most of us have responded positively toward Elon not only because of his accomplishments, but also because he inspires us. If he can't get the optimism/realism balance quite right, most of us would rather that he err (slightly) on the side of optimism.
But I agree that it would be better to get the balance right, and at least half of the time to 'under promise and over deliver.'
