The Big List of Elon Musk’s Hyperbole, Evasions, and Outright Lies

Is he flat-out lying, or does he truly buy his own hype? For more than a decade, Musk has evangelized on the concept of a Hyperloop, or a pneumatic tube system for transporting people and vehicles at tremendous speed. He estimated in a 2013 proposal that a pod would be able to whisk passengers from L.A. to San Francisco in just 35 minutes and “feel a lot like being on an airplane.” Alternately, he has pitched such a design, sometimes derided as a crummy reimagining of the subway, for local use — as a way to avoid traffic in Los Angeles, for example.

A former SpaceX subsidiary, the Boring Company, spun out as a separate business in 2018, did build a few short tunnels, including a mile-long prototype tube near SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. But other proposed loops never materialized. A route connecting the East Hollywood area of L.A. to Dodger Stadium, which was supposed to be finished in 2020, remains a fantasy; slated projects in Chicago and Washington, D.C. were quietly shelved. 

There’s one instance, though, where it does seem to be less of an exaggeration than a cynical ploy to derail other plans. In the case of the L.A.-to-San Francisco tube, Musk told his biographer, Ashlee Vance, that he suggested a Hyperloop route because he wanted to kill plans for the proposed high-speed rail in California, which he viewed as too costly and inefficient. Today, the Hawthorne tunnel has been replaced by a parking lot, and the Boring Company’s sole operational loop is a 2.2.-mile route around the Las Vegas Convention Center, where customers ride in Teslas at fairly low speeds and, yes, still sometimes sit in traffic.

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This lie was pretty blatant — so much so that he ended up facing SEC allegations of fraud as a result. Basically, Musk caused a seismic shift in the stock market on Aug. 7, 2018, when he tweeted, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” Though it was interpreted by some as an off-the-cuff stoner joke — Musk has often riffed on the so-called “weed number” — the post caused the automaker’s stock price to jump. Weeks later, Musk would walk back that announcement, citing shareholder pressure, and Tesla’s stock slumped by almost 40 percent in the following year.

In the immediate aftermath, Musk had to settle a fraud charge from the Securities and Exchange Commission over his “Funding secured” assertion, which the agency said “lacked an adequate basis in fact.” He and Tesla each paid a $20 million fine, and Musk stepped down as chairman of the company. In a subsequent lawsuit brought by investors who claimed billions in damages as a result of the tweet, Musk continued to falsely insist the tweet was accurate, even though the judge for the case had ruled it wasn’t. That judge wrote that “there was nothing concrete about [the] funding” Musk said he expected to receive from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund at the time. Despite the lie, Musk was ultimately found not liable for shareholder losses.

Musk tends to aggrandize the potential capabilities of SpaceX, and therefore finds himself regularly hinting at the rocket company’s rapid progress toward its ultimate goal of a human colony on Mars. You could call it misplaced optimism, but the fact remains that he keeps throwing out timelines for a manned flight to our neighboring planet only to later kick that can down the road. Experts voice their doubt whenever Musk offers an updated schedule, giving the impression that his estimates are grounded less in feasibility than ambiguous vibes.

In a 2011 interview, Musk said SpaceX could put a person on Mars within a decade, at least in a “best case” scenario — at worst, he claimed, it would take 15 or 20 years. That gave him a fairly wide window to make good on the boast, as well as splashy headlines for the 10-year frame. Obviously, 2021 has come and gone, but well before that, Musk was trying to manage expectations while maintaining that Mars missions were imminent: In 2017, he outlined plans to send an uncrewed spaceship to Mars in 2022, followed by a human voyage in 2024. The former did not happen, and nobody will be blasting off to the red planet next year, either. By 2020, Musk was “highly confident” SpaceX could send a crew to Mars in 2026. But the date has since been pushed back again: last year, Musk tweeted out his latest prediction, envisioning a landing in 2029. Technically, if SpaceX pulls it off by 2031, Musk’s original outside guess of 20 years will prove correct. But don’t hold your breath. For one thing, NASA scientists have said we don’t possess the means to make Mars habitable in the near future, contrary to Musk’s stubborn belief that we can terraform its surface. Hard to imagine the company flying people 228 million miles to a barren rock without any way to sustainably support life there.   

As the world collectively held its breath for a Thai youth soccer team trapped in a flooded cave system in the summer of 2018, awaiting a logistically complex rescue, Musk thought he could solve the problem with a miniature submersible designed by engineers at SpaceX and the Boring Company. Although the sub was completed and sent to Thailand, it went unused, and British cave diver Vernon Unsworth dismissed it as a PR stunt. “It just had absolutely no chance of working,” Unsworth said. “Musk had no conception of what the cave passage was like.” Musk retaliated in a tweet, calling Unsworth “a pedo guy,” which would lead to a defamation lawsuit Musk eventually won.

Less well-known than the “pedo” smear, however, are the further lies about Unsworth that Musk sent in a subsequent email to BuzzFeed News, alleging without proof that the diver was involved in child sex-trafficking and had at one point taken a 12-year-old girl as a bride. It was all clearly made up: Unsworth denied everything, and none of it could be substantiated by BuzzFeed. Neither were there any facts to support Musk’s claim that Unsworth didn’t take part in the successful effort to save the trapped soccer team and was, moreover, “banned” from the rescue site. A fellow diver who participated in the mission commented that these remarks were “completely unfounded,” calling Unsworth “pivotal to the entire operation.”

This isn’t so much a lie, really, as a refusal to accept the limits of current technology. Tesla is a cutting-edge brand, manufacturing cars that are not only powered by electricity but outfitted with an entire suite of futuristic features. Yet there’s one technological milestone, continually touted by Musk as an inevitable achievement, that the company can’t crack: safe and reliable Autopilot. It’s no small problem, either. Musk said last year that Tesla is “worth basically zero” if it can’t deliver the autonomous driving system he has promised for a decade. 

As long ago as 2015, when Autopilot was rolled out, the CEO was saying Model S drivers would soon enjoy the luxury of having their car navigate streets and freeways for them. The next year, Tesla offered a video preview of a fully self-driving vehicle in action — footage that was faked, according to testimony from a senior engineer this past January in a wrongful death lawsuit against Tesla over an Autopilot-involved crash. Musk has continued to claim, year after year, that a few months hence, Teslas will be able to drive across the U.S. without input from a human. We’ve yet to see it, and some shareholders have had enough. This year, an investor group sued Tesla and Musk, contending that he and other executives “significantly overstated the efficacy, viability, and safety of the Company’s Autopilot and [Full Self-Driving] technologies,” just days after more than 300,000 Teslas were recalled due to unsafe FSD behavior. (Musk has not publicly commented on the ongoing legal action.)

You don’t have to take the shareholders’ word for it, however: Tesla’s own employees have said that Musk exaggerates Tesla’s autonomous functionality. The company’s director of autopilot software informed the California Department of Motor Vehicles in a March 2021 memo that Musk’s estimate that the “car will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human” by the end of that year did “not match engineering reality.” Other communications between Tesla representatives and DMV officials have indicated a similar disconnect between Musk’s patter (he said in June that Tesla is “very close to achieving full self-driving without human supervision,” once again predicting fully driverless cars “later this year”) and actual progress on that front. Meanwhile, the Autopilot system has been involved in hundreds of crashes that have resulted in serious injuries and 17 deaths.

It’s been a bumpy ride for Elon’s X, not least because Musk has demonstrated a pattern of dishonesty regarding issues with the site, both before he assumed control of it and ever since. 

When Musk stated his intention to acquire Twitter for $44 billion early in 2022, more than a few observers voiced skepticism — perhaps recalling the canceled take-private of Tesla in 2018. It’s entirely possible the mogul saw the offer as a joke or a bluff, given that he then made three attempts to back out of the deal before he was forced to complete it, in order to preempt a courtroom battle he was bound to lose.

As he tried to wriggle out of the purchase, he complained that bots and spam had overtaken the site, and after he was installed as CEO, he claimed to have eradicated “at least 90 percent of scams,” aided by a new paid verification system. None of that was measurably true. 

In the early days of his Twitter ownership, Musk had the bright idea to appoint a council of individuals with “widely diverse viewpoints” to make big decisions on content moderation and whether to lift suspensions on prominent banned users, including Donald Trump. We never learned who those individuals might be, because no council was ever convened, and Musk began arbitrarily reinstating whoever he liked — including Donald Trump. Okay then!

Another gimmick Musk employed as he took the reins at Twitter was a bit of performative democracy: before he made significant policy changes, he would put a question to the entire site in the form of a poll and have users vote. At one point he even apologized for neglecting to do this, saying it would not happen again. But that was back in December 2022, and in the ensuing months, Musk has overhauled plenty of Twitter’s most recognizable elements  — from the elimination of the original blue check verification system to the institution of his “X” branding — without public input. His latest unilateral move? Apparently taking away the option to block other accounts.  

Musk prides himself as a champion of open expression, loudly declaring that he’s a free speech absolutist. He cited the need to preserve such rights in the “digital town square” as a reason for buying Twitter. To that end, he reinstated a number of accounts previously suspended for hate speech or misinformation, and hyped up reporting on the “Twitter Files,” which were supposed to reveal the extent to which the site’s previous operators were engaged in left-wing censorship. (In fact, Twitter also fielded many requests from Republicans who wanted certain posts removed.)

In practice, however, Musk has proven himself a capricious censor in his own right. He’s taken steps to throttle links to competitor platforms including Substack, Bluesky and Threads, suspended journalists he dislikes, and limited traffic to specific media sites. He promised not to ban an account that tracked the movements of his private jet; then he went ahead and did so anyway. Twitter complies with more government censorship requests under Musk than it did before his arrival. Sure, he welcomed Nazis back to the platform, but other than that, his commitment to unchecked free speech has been minimal.    

It’s no secret that Musk has liked and elevated a ton of transphobic content in his time at Twitter. But perhaps his most harebrained attack on the trans community was a declaration in June that the words “cisgender” and “cis” — clinical terms that simply describe a person whose gender identity conforms to the sex they were assigned at birth — would be considered slurs according to company policy going forward. In theory, then, anyone calling someone else cis on the platform would be subject to a suspension. Thankfully, this rule doesn’t appear to have been enforced anywhere. It’s just one more example of Musk not following through on what he says.

Musk labeled the eradication of child exploitation material on Twitter a number-one priority in November 2022. While it’s no surprise that he’s struggled to contain the problem (he gutted moderation teams and dissolved the company’s Trust and Safety council), he also personally intervened to reinstate the suspended account of a far-right QAnon influencer who had shared graphic child sexual abuse material. If that weren’t hypocritical enough, Twitter is meanwhile paying that same conspiracy theorist under its ad revenue sharing program. Most absurd of all, when Musk allowed this individual back on the platform, he tweeted that only staffers had seen the offending imagery. It was a blatant lie: the post had already been up for four days and, according to Twitter’s own metrics, was viewed 3.1 million times by users.

Musk infamously tweeted in March 2020 that he expected “close to zero new cases” of Covid-19 in the U.S. by the end of April. Instead, more than 1.1 million Americans died of the disease over the next few years. While this may simply be a case of failed prognostication, it did foreshadow Musk’s descent into contrarian, occasionally conspiracist narratives based on little evidence.

After he bought Twitter in 2022, he began to regularly amplify and engage with fake news on the platform, boosting a wide range of misinformation. In October, days after taking over, he shared a made-up article from a fringe website reporting that Paul Pelosi, husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, had gotten in a fight with a male sex worker that turned physical. (In truth, he’d been attacked by a politically motivated assailant looking for his wife.) 

This year, he contested the identification of a mass shooter who killed eight people at an Allen, Texas mall as a white supremacist, speculating that a social media footprint proving as much could’ve been part of a “bad psyop.” He has also thrown his lot in with right-wing conspiracy theorists who say the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was a “Big Lie,” tried to sow fear around safe and effective vaccines, and has argued that businessman and philanthropist George Soros, a perennial target of antisemitic propaganda, “hates humanity.” 

This month, Musk sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which researches hate speech and disinformation online, a sign that he will likely continue to dabble in both while denying that he enables accounts that peddle such content. When researchers found the advent of his Twitter regime coincided with an unprecedented flourishing of slurs and racism, he flatly contradicted them by presenting a graph devoid of any meaningful context.

Recent weeks have witnessed the stupid saga of Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg dancing around the prospect of a mixed martial arts “cage match.” Nominally predicated on Zuck’s newfound passion for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the two men’s rivalry in the social media space (Meta recently unveiled a Twitter competitor, Threads, to great fanfare), the event has no set date but has inspired plenty of taunting on both sides — as well as bizarre untruths from Musk.

Musk went so far as to announce on Twitter that he and Zuckerberg had settled on several key details, including the decision to have their respective foundations oversee the match as opposed to Ultimate Fighting Championship. Zuck denied having agreed to this, posting on Threads that he wanted a professional MMA organization like the UFC to take part. Musk also said the battle would take place in an “epic location” among the ruins of ancient Rome, boasting approval from Italy’s prime minister and minister of culture. The latter official, Gennaro Sangiuliano, contradicted this, telling the Guardian that discussions were ongoing, but no Musk vs. Zuckerberg brawl would be held in Rome.

Finally, on Monday, Musk tweeted that during a Tesla full self-driving test that night, he would ask the car to take him to Zuckerberg’s house in Palo Alto to challenge him in person — and livestream everything. Needless to say, that didn’t happen, and a Meta spokesperson brushed off the threat. “Mark is traveling right now and isn’t in Palo Alto,” they said. “Also, Mark takes this sport seriously and isn’t going to fight someone who randomly shows up at his door.”

After so many years transparent fibs and fakery, where will Musk’s tenuous relationship with reality take him next? No doubt he’ll have to once again delay various Tesla products that have missed multiple release dates. He might get the chance to argue that SpaceX rockets don’t harm the local environment, thanks to a lawsuit alleging that a test launch this year started a brush fire and hurled chunks of concrete and metal shrapnel into a Texas wildlife refuge. And his pledge to fund the legal bills for anyone “unfairly treated” by an employer for what they post or like on Twitter should fall apart any minute now.

Still, don’t underestimate his penchant for misrepresenting something totally irrelevant to his professional life, like being “trained” in “no rules street fighting.” If Musk’s lying is predictable, the lies themselves are anything but.