Tesla had its quarterly earnings call yesterday. Even with decent revenue/earnings, it… didn’t seem to go as well as Elon might have hoped.

Here’s another take (h/t Dean Blundell:

Seems as of Musk told Tesla buyers for years that - if they paid for it - their vehicles would be able to handle FSD (Full Self-Driving) and it turned out to be fiction.

Now we just need to wait for Optimus robots and Tesla robotaxis

There isn’t a timely “vision” or deadline that Elon has met yet - as with seemingly all tech bro visionaries - achieving their visions always seems to be just over the future horizon.

As for SpaceX, let’s turn to the relentless and implacable e.w. nierdemeyer

I get it: to date, Elon has been, frankly, the most incredibly financially successful person in the world, so who are we to question him?

Well, one of the most spectacular all-time failures in business is now our President, so failing up is not unheard of…

Elon is smart (but not as smart as he thinks he is) and he has been able to identify opportunities (and then ride the back of others who actually do the work to build something out of those opportunities). However, I’d argue he has two superpowers: his ability to suck money out of government contracts (the basis and initial source of his wealth and success) and his ability to hype his future “visions”.

Here is a brief list of his “visions” for the future:

Next on the agenda? His SpaceX IPO which is predicated on building and maintaining data centers in space. In a reply to someone posting the following on X in December 2025, "The most important thing in the next 3-4 years is data centers in space. In every way, data centers in space, from a first principles perspective, are superior to data centers on earth.", Musk simply replied “True”. Of course, in a pre-IPO filing (filings that do not allow for unsupportable ‘hype’), SpaceX throws significant water on the data center fire.

This is in line with other tech Masters of the Universe visions for the future: creating unending affordable abundance here on earth that will provide for every human need (for every human person); colonizing not just space, but galaxies; transferring human brains/souls into computers for eternal life (these guys - and they’re always guys - seem to fear death and want to live forever).

Of course, the commonality in all these visions seems to be the requirement that we give them gobs of money NOW to achieve these “always over the horizon” future fantasies.

NOTE: I actually believe humans have the capability to do incredible things. However, physics and the realities of empirical difficulties in dealing with the micro (mapping the human brain and even understanding what “intelligence” actually is), the mid-level (creating incredibly cheap abundance through AI while still needing to, well, somehow pay the cost of building real material things here on earth that people need/want), and the macro (dealing with staying alive in space and traveling hard-to-understand distances) makes many of these visions unrealistic for the foreseeable future. I’m talking hundreds or thousands of years.

In the meantime, we can’t even feed, house and provide healthcare for everyone here in the U.S.

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As long as I’m talking about tech, in 22 bullet points, CEO Alex Karp and Palantir recently laid out their vision for why the company exists and what they believe the future should look like for their company and our country.

Here’s my quick hot take on the recent Palantir Manifesto:

Oof.

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