AP Images / Mark Lennihan
- Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised profitability, vehicle deliveries, and more to his shareholders, customers, and employees over the years.
- Not all of his visions have panned out.
- The electric automaker's wider-than-expected quarterly loss this week and profitability forecast highlight Musk's pattern of issuing expectations that end up needing adjustment.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a visionary.
He's accelerated the rate of electric vehicle adoption across the world, while also exploring Mars and digging tunnels.
But the billionaire also has a habit of over-promising and under-delivering.
For Tesla skeptics, those ambitious targets that don't always get met on time are proof enough that Musk is a fraud. Yet for some of the company's staunchest supporters, the same execution is just proof he's a genius at work who can't be confined to traditional metrics.
"Sell-side analysts who don't know the guy, who don't understand the technology, who don't understand what it is like to work at Tesla - they translate his 'shot for the moon' as 'they missed it,'" Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research, easily Tesla's biggest Wall Street bull for years, told Business Insider last year.
"Instead of translating it as 'they started,' they translate that into 'they failed,' which is a massive mistake. It's just a wrong way of translating Elon Musk."
Here are nine of Musk's pledges that have yet to reach their fully promised potential:
