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The Elon Hubris Deposition Test

Would an ordinary person have been misled by Musk’s hyperventilating into believing that the company’s “self-driving” cars could actually, you know, drive themselves?

Elon Musk’s over-the-top salesmanship may finally come back to haunt him.
Elon Musk’s over-the-top salesmanship may finally come back to haunt him. Photo: Ludovic Marin/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
Eriq Gardner
June 26, 2023

At the annual Code Conference in 2016, Elon Musk, then arguably at the height of his self-aggrandizing, hyperbolic powers, made an assertion that would ripple into the present. “Autonomous driving is a solved problem,” he declared, onstage with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Highways were now “relatively easy” to navigate using the technology, he continued. Incredibly, he claimed, the Tesla Model X “can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person right now.”