Source: Elon Musk Laid Out 602 Goals. We Counted How Many He Hit. Publisher: The New York Times | Author: Kirsten Grind, Jack Ewing, Aaron Krolik, Lily Boyce Published: June 2, 2026 | Archived: June 2, 2026

Elon Musk has laid out hundreds of goals over the years for what he plans to achieve at his businesses.

Mr. Musk, 54, has said his rocket company, SpaceX, will build a colony of humans on Mars. He has said that Tesla, his electric carmaker, will incorporate fully autonomous driving abilities into all of its cars. And he has promised to show that humanoid robots made by Tesla are dexterous enough to thread a needle.

None of these have happened.

Ahead of SpaceX’s planned initial public offering this month, The New York Times analyzed statements that Mr. Musk has made about his businesses on social media or during investor calls over the last 15 years. He delivered only some of what he said he would, when he said he would, the analysis found.

Strikingly, Mr. Musk’s annual rate of success declined over time, even as he made more promises. Of the 13 goals he declared in 2015, he later achieved nearly three-quarters of them, The Times found. But of the 27 claims he made in 2020, fewer than half have been accomplished on time. Some still have deadlines far in the future.

Mr. Musk’s ability to follow through on what he says is increasingly in the spotlight with SpaceX’s I.P.O., which is set to be one of the largest offerings ever. The billionaire has major ambitions for the company, which operates rocket launches and the Starlink satellite internet service, as well as artificial intelligence efforts and the social media platform X.

Mr. Musk owns 50 percent of SpaceX and controls more than 85 percent of the shareholder votes, according to its prospectus. His grip on the company is tight, and the performance of SpaceX, which has valued itself at $1.25 trillion, hinges on whether he does what he says he will, such as putting A.I. data centers into orbit.

About 150 of Mr. Musk’s goals over the years were about SpaceX, The Times found. Of those, about 32 percent were achieved within one year of their stated goal, while 19 percent were more than a year late or remained unfulfilled. Half of the goals could not be verified because the plans were too vague or the date was too far out.

Many chief executives overpromise and underdeliver. But Mr. Musk is a singular figure in the business world, and what he says carries extra weight. Investors typically bet on him specifically, based on his record of disrupting industries such as cars and rockets. At Tesla, where Mr. Musk serves as chief executive and owns about 20 percent of shares, the company’s $1.3 trillion market capitalization relies largely on his future plans, according to analyst estimates.

“The market is trading and selling on what he is saying,” Sky Moore, a corporate lawyer who has reviewed Tesla’s financial filings, said of Mr. Musk.

The Times analyzed more than 69,000 of Mr. Musk’s social media posts from 2011 through this January, as well as his public comments on 19 Tesla investor calls since 2021, when transcripts became available. The Times compiled what Mr. Musk said about Tesla, which is publicly traded, and his five private companies, SpaceX, Neuralink, X, xAI and the Boring Company, though SpaceX recently absorbed X and xAI.

From those, The Times tallied any public statement that Mr. Musk made in which he committed to a future deadline about his businesses. The analysis did not include comments on podcasts, in media interviews and at other events.

Mr. Musk has gotten into trouble several times for making public statements about Tesla and X, formerly known as Twitter, that did not pan out. Public companies are prohibited by law from misrepresenting or omitting information to investors, which could amount to securities fraud.

The highest-profile instance was in 2018 when Mr. Musk said he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share, though he had not lined up the financing for such a deal. He did not end up taking Tesla private.

That same year, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Mr. Musk with securities fraud and accused him of misleading investors. Mr. Musk and Tesla soon settled with the regulator for $40 million without admitting or denying wrongdoing. Mr. Musk also stepped down as Tesla’s chairman, and the board agreed to review his communications.

In 2023, Mr. Musk separately prevailed against a lawsuit aiming to hold him responsible for investor losses related to his comments that he had secured the funding to take Tesla private.

Many people have tolerated Mr. Musk’s behavior because he has enriched investors with his successes at companies like Tesla. They see his statements as a sign of ambition and his way of motivating employees.

“He does set these really ambitious goals, because in his words, he wants quantum change, and you don’t get quantum change asking for incremental growth,” said Jon McNeill, Tesla’s president between 2015 and 2018.

Mr. Musk and representatives for SpaceX and Tesla did not return requests for comment.

No Driver Needed

Mr. Musk has talked most frequently about how Tesla will achieve “full self-driving,” the company’s program for vehicles that can drive themselves without human intervention. Reaching this is important to Tesla’s status as the world’s most valuable car company, especially as its car sales have declined since 2023.

Over 60 of Mr. Musk’s more than 600 goals were related to the autonomous driving technology, which includes Tesla’s robotaxi program. The billionaire first promised the technology in 2016, according to The Times’s analysis.

Tesla has inched closer toward full self-driving. This year, it offered fully autonomous rides with no human safety monitors in the Texas cities of Austin, Dallas and Houston.

But the company lags other autonomous car providers. Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, which owns Google, offers driverless rides in 11 U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Miami and Phoenix.

In April, J.P. Morgan analysts said Tesla faced dwindling confidence in its “ability to achieve lofty out-year objectives.” Its stock has fallen 14 percent since December, when it hit a record high.

Mr. Musk recently voiced a rare mea culpa. Teslas with older computer systems, known as Hardware 3, could not run software allowing them to drive autonomously, he acknowledged. In 2023, he had promised that those cars would have that ability.

“I wish it were otherwise,” he said in an investor call in April.

Destination Mars

Of all the goals Mr. Musk has laid out, perhaps the most eye-catching have been about how SpaceX will reach and colonize Mars.

Mr. Musk founded his space company in 2002 with that plan in mind, saying he wanted to make human life “multiplanetary.”

He has made goals related to Mars 19 times, according to The Times’s analysis. But in his comments, Mr. Musk’s timeline for getting to the Red Planet changed or included deadlines that are still in the future.

In 2011, he said that SpaceX would reach Mars in about 10 years or “worst case 15 to 20 years.” He appeared undaunted that Mars is about 140 million miles from Earth, with an inhospitable climate and terrain. Mr. Musk decorated SpaceX’s then-headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., with pictures and maps of Mars, and one of his homes with similar renderings. SpaceX employees, including Mr. Musk, became known for wearing “Occupy Mars” T-shirts.

I think we will see people on Mars in less than 20 years. 12 to 15 years most likely. #OccupyMars

Over the last decade, Mr. Musk made progress toward getting to Mars. In 2016, he talked about plans for a “Mars Colonial Transporter,” a spaceship that would ferry humans to the planet. SpaceX built the rocket, which was eventually called Starship and is larger than the Statue of Liberty. Other plans for Starship included space where humans could live for months at a time.

@LadoBitnar I am highly confident that we can send several uncrewed Starships to Mars in 2 years. If those ships don’t increment the crater count on Mars, then crewed ships can be sent in 4 years.

But many of Mr. Musk’s deadlines for reaching Mars keep shifting, which became particularly noticeable in recent years. In March 2024, he said Starship would arrive on Mars “within five years.” A year later, he said the spaceship would depart for Mars “at the end of next year.”

NASA has said that the best-case scenario would be that humans reach Mars in the mid-2030s.

In April 2024, Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees that he expected one million people to be living on Mars in about 20 years. He had quietly directed employees to begin working on plans for a city there.

Starship departs for Mars at the end of next year, carrying Optimus. If those landings go well, then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely.

Yet in February, Mr. Musk revised his thinking again, saying that creating a Martian city would take “20+ years.” Instead, he said, SpaceX would colonize the moon.

While SpaceX has a contract with NASA to reach the moon, Mr. Musk had not previously aimed to build a colony there, said Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and a former friend of Mr. Musk’s who has informally advised him on Mars, as well as other people close to the tech mogul.

“He has become, in recent years, not too careful about how close his remarks are to the truth,” Mr. Zubrin said.

Methodology

The Times analyzed Elon Musk’s posts, replies and quotes on X between December 2011 and January 2026, along with transcripts of Tesla earnings calls from December 2021 to January 2026. The Times used a large language model to detect “promises,” which were defined as concrete commitments to achieve a future goal. Reporters manually verified, researched and categorized the flagged statements, plus a sample of those the model rejected, to build a final dataset for analysis.