That simply isn't true. Progress toward a goal isn't the same as leading the field.

Autonomous driving is the clearest counterexample: by March 2026 Waymo had logged over 220 million rider-only miles with nobody in the driver's seat, and was doing 400,000+ rides per week across six US metros. Tesla's consumer product is still officially "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)," and Tesla itself says it does not make the car autonomous. Mercedes has Level 3 certification. Tesla has none.

Optimus missed the stated 5,000 robots in 2025. As of July 2026, Tesla still isn't selling it and is only preparing manufacturing capacity. Meanwhile Agility's Digit is in commercial warehouse deployment today. Solar Roof is worse: Musk targeted 1,000 installations per week, and Wood Mackenzie estimated Tesla averaged about 21 in 2022. Tesla's disputed the number but offered no replacement count.

SpaceX is the real exception. It genuinely leads, and the engineering is remarkable. But it's still a decade overdue on "crewed Mars by 2024." That's the point: on the one venture where "more progress than anyone else" is actually true, the promise is still failing by over a decade.

The criticism isn't that nothing comes to pass. It's that concrete near term promises repeatedly fail and get replaced by bigger ones. When a valuation depends on being uniquely far ahead, competitors catching up erases that premium fast.