I had no idea this existed, that's pretty damning.

The question - is Musk lying on purpose, or is this more 90-90 rule where he made (obviously wrong) assumptions based on current progress?

If he himself believes he can achieve his off-the-cuff deadlines or not doesn't matter for the rest of us: he already proven himself to be a fabulist, and after so many failed predictions, should know better than to air them in public, especially as he must be acutely aware that making such claims inflates his and his companies' net worth, and hence has legal implications. Only he cares not about those, as none of his past misdeeds had any serious consequences to himself.

How about the possibility that the cost of lying is less than the capital gains that can be realized by lying about it? EM was only fined $20 million when he said he had secured funding to take the company private at $420/share [0]. The stock bounce from that "news" was in the billions.

As it stands, he can get a trillion dollar pay package if a something-trillion market cap target is hit.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/elon-musk-loses-...

The latter implies there is any progress to project out from.