Everything Elon Musk promised in 2025, but he didn’t deliver

By now, everyone knows that Elon Musk is very optimistic when it comes to making predictions.

That’s a good way to put it. To put it bluntly, Musk is a “bullshit artist.” He makes promises he can’t keep. For example, everyone is now probably very familiar with his famous 2011 interview no The Wall Street Journal when he said he would put a man on Mars in 10 years. That was 14 years ago and we are no closer to putting a man on Mars. Over the years, Musk has also touted his proposed Hyperloop train system as a way to rapidly transport people between cities; that did not materialize and was probably a ploy to stop other transportation projects.

As the year 2025 draws to a close, Mashable decided to revisit its predictions related to this year. The time is up. What did Musk promise this year that didn’t come true?

People on Mars in 2025

Yes, I just said that in 2011 The Wall Street Journal interview where Musk promised to put a man on Mars in 10 years. However, this is a completely different promise from Musk about a man on Mars.

Back in 2016 – almost four years after his 10th birthday WSJ claim – Musk made an appearance on time Recode’s Code 2016 Conference. During an interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, Musk reversed his previous prediction of a manned Mars landing in 2021. According to Musk, SpaceX will begin sending rockets to Mars in 2018, followed by new Mars missions every 26 months, and then they started sending people.

“If things go according to plan, we should be able to launch humans probably in 2024 when they arrive in 2025,” Musk said, referring to the colonists arriving on Earth.

No – 2025 has come and gone and we’re still not on Mars.

Tesla robotaxis will cover half of the US population

Go and walk outside. How many Tesla robots do you see? Nothing, you say? And you say you live in Austin, Texas – the only place in the US where robots are currently operating?

That’s weird. Because in July, during Tesla’s Q2 financial report, Musk told investors that Tesla’s robotaxis will be serving half of the nation.

“I believe half of the US population will be covered by Tesla’s robotaxi by the end of the year,” Musk said.

Obviously, that is not true. And a new report from New York Times last week they discovered that even Austin locals rarely, if ever, experience Tesla’s robotaxis.

As an EV source Electrek pointed out during his claim, it was stupid for Musk to do it. However, he made the claim with a straight face and investors believed him.

A completely driverless Tesla robotaxis

Speaking of Tesla’s robotaxis, when you meet one, did you know you’ll actually find a human security monitor riding inside? He will, despite what Musk has promised before.

“Teslas will be out in the wild with no one in them, in June in Austin,” Musk said said last year in the 2024 Q4 earnings call. “This is not a distant fantasy situation, it is five, six months away.”

When Tesla’s robotaxi service arrived in Austin at that point in the timeline, they didn’t have “a human in them.” The level of autonomy at which Tesla operates requires a to monitor people’s safety riding inside a car, according to Texas law.

But, Musk has promised several times in the past few months that those security guards will be removed by the end of 2025.

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Musk says so in a posted in September at X.

“The safety driver is only there for the first few months to be safe,” Musk said. “It should not be a safety driver at the end of the year.”

Musk reiterated that schedule during an earnings call in October.

“We expect to have no safety drivers at least in the greater Austin area by the end of this year, so within a few months,” Musk. said.

Musk then repeated that claim in early December during the xAI hackathon.

“Unsupervised is pretty well resolved at this point,” said Musk. “So there will be a Tesla robotaxis operating in Austin with no one in it. Not even anyone in the passenger seat for about three weeks.”

Last week, Musk posted that he was riding in a fully self-driving Tesla robot in Austin. A Tesla employee shared the video from the inside to ride the driver and. However, this appears to be a test as regular customers are still reporting that human security guards are still part of the tour, at least as of late December.

xAI will achieve AGI

Artificial general intelligence or AGI is basically the holy grail of today’s AI-obsessed tech industry. AGI can be defined as the type of artificial intelligence that is promised in sci-fi movies. It’s not a giant language model that can sound like a human, like existing AI, but an AI that can perform intellectual tasks like a human. It can think, learn, think and act.

In 2024, responding to his social media platform X, Musk said that his AI company xAI will achieve AGI in 2025.

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“How long until AGI?” posted Logan Kilpatrick of Google AI Studio.

“Next year,” Musk answered.

“It’s great if it’s true,” Kilpatrick replied.

Well, be surprised. It wasn’t true.

According to a new report emerging Business InsiderMusk has already removed the polls and says that xAI can succeed AGI in the next few years and maybe even next year! We’ll report at the end of 2026 unless Musk’s version of Skynet takes over.

The long awaited Tesla Roadster flying car / demo

This is a combination of two potential promises, as it is still unclear what Musk was actually talking about on Joe Rogan’s podcast in November.

At the time of appearing on The Joe Rogan ExperienceMusk said Tesla will drop the long-awaited Roadster demo, a car the company announced and began taking pre-orders in 2017. The Tesla Roadster is still to be released eight years later.

“We’re close to showing the prototype,” Musk told Rogan during the show. “I think this will be…one thing I can guarantee is that this product demo will not be forgotten.”

When pressed for a timeline from Rogan, Musk replied “hopefully before the end of the year.”

However, Musk left continuouslyremembering how his “friend” Peter Thiel used to say that the future should have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars. Rogan questioned Musk further but Musk simply pointed out that Thief should be able to afford a flying car and we’ll all have to wait to see a demo.

So, was Musk saying the Roadster could fly? Was Musk really serious about a flying car? Who knows. But, 2025 is now over and we don’t have a flying car demo or a Roadster so Musk didn’t deliver.

DOGE to reduce 2 billion dollars in ‘fraud, fraud and abuse’

After Donald Trump’s re-election, Musk was given the opportunity to lead a new government agency called DOGE where he promised to cut $2 billion in what he described as “waste, fraud and abuse.”

DOGE quickly became as controversial as Musk with his own a very small group struggle to find any real “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government. Many of DOGE’s claims of fraud were released and the group had a habit of sending incorrect data which put the team in a good light.

Musk’s promise of $2 trillion in cuts quickly became a promise of $1 trillion in cuts. That $1 trillion promise? That was soon reduced to hundreds of billions.

Now, a new analysis from New York Times as well as food CATO Centerfound that DOGE actually kept nothing. Many of the government contacts DOGE says it is canceling are still working. In fact, government spending and indeed he went up on the DOGE watch.

“The federal government spent $7.6 trillion in the first 11 months of 2025, about $248 billion in November 2025 compared to the same month in 2024,” said the CATO Institute. analysis said.

Although Musk failed to fulfill his DOGE promises, the cuts he made to USAID and foreign aid programs it is reported that it led to the death of hundreds of thousands. Happy New Year?

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