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Greetings! Whether you consider Elon Musk a visionary or a liar, he has a long record of publicly setting aggressive deadlines that his companies don’t meet. Barring any big breakthroughs over the next few days, the 2025 list will include high-profile promises on robotics manufacturing, robotaxis and AI models that fell short. On one hand, that’s business as usual for the Musk companies. But the stakes have risen drastically as investors have propelled Tesla, SpaceX and xAI valuations higher. One of the most critical areas to Musk’s success is Tesla’s autonomous taxi service and self-driving software, given declining demand for its electric vehicles. Tesla will report fourth quarter delivery figures Friday. Analysts expect they will show 2025 has been the second full year in a row of falling vehicle deliveries. Musk has repeatedly walked back or missed self-imposed 2025 targets for Robotaxis and other self-driving vehicles, putting Tesla further behind Alphabet’s Waymo. In July, Musk said he expected Tesla’s Robotaxi service to be available to half the U.S. population by the end of 2025, “subject to regulatory approvals.” Then in October, Musk dialed back his Robotaxi goal to launching in eight to 10 U.S. metro areas by the end of 2025. But as of late December, Tesla still has not expanded Robotaxi outside of Austin and San Francisco, and still has human supervisors in all customer rides in both cities, according to reports from users. Waymo, meanwhile, has been offering rides without backup drivers in five cities. The company has far more autonomous taxis than Tesla, all of them without backup people, running in both Austin and San Francisco. Musk also made audacious promises about the self-driving software in private Tesla vehicles this year. In April, he promised a massive technological leap in Tesla‘s driving software in 2025, saying drivers in many U.S. cities would be able to “go to sleep in your car and wake up at your destination” by the end of the year. That has not been the case—Tesla’s driving software still requires supervision from drivers. To be sure, Musk blowing through deadlines for Tesla self-driving is nothing new. The habit hasn’t stopped investors from pouring dollars into Musk’s vision. Tesla shares are up 27% this year. His $1 trillion compensation package, contingent on hitting financial and product goals for self-driving software and robotaxis, was overwhelmingly approved last month by shareholders. Optimus and SpaceX Elsewhere at Tesla, the company has fallen short of production goals for its Optimus humanoid robot, which Musk has said will one day account for the vast majority of the company’s value. In March, Musk said that Tesla would produce 5,000 Optimus robots by the end of 2025. Tesla then slashed its production goal to 2,000 before cutting it further. It also delayed expanding production of Optimus due to technical challenges, especially issues with its hands. Musk and SpaceX have also said that in 2026 Optimus will go to Mars aboard SpaceX’s Starship. SpaceX’s website still says the mission is on track for next year and features renderings of Optimus walking on Mars. However, Musk has been downplaying the chances that such a mission to Mars will happen. In August, he said there was a “slight chance” that a Starship “crewed by Optimus” could happen in November or December 2026, but said that three-and-a-half years into the future was a more likely target. In recent months, Musk has been talking less about Mars and more about data centers in space and near-term missions to the Moon, a key priority for the Trump administration. xAI and X Money Musk has also spent much of 2025 working on xAI, the AI company that is racing to catch up to OpenAI and Google. In July, xAI released Grok 4, its latest flagship model, in July. Then in August, Musk promised on X that xAI would follow it up with Grok 5, another “crushingly good” model, before the end of the year. But in November, Musk said that Grok 5 would instead be released in the first quarter of 2026. As Musk has increasingly focused on xAI, he’s spent less time on the social media service X, formerly known as Twitter. In January, then-X CEO Linda Yaccarino said that X would launch a payments service called X Money later in 2025 through a partnership with Visa, teasing it as the “first of many big announcements about X Money this year.” In March, X was acquired by xAI, and in July, Yaccarino stepped down. While X says it’s still moving forward with X Money—an executive named Dhruv Batura is now leading the project—the company has yet to win approval from New York’s state financial regulator, a key hurdle if the company wants to launch it as a nationwide service. The regulator has raised concerns to X staff about the service’s proposed design. In December, Musk gave a brief update on X Money, saying in a post that it “has been launched internally.” But he did not say when it would be available to the public. X Money’s X account still says it is “launching in 2025” but has not made any posts since January. | 
