Twitter, Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX: The Week That Ran on Elon Musk Time
Propensity for ambitious, fuzzy deadlines is now on display at the social-media platform
4 min
The past week offered a dizzying display of Elon Musk’s multitasking range.
In the space of a few days, he showed off a monkey typing using a brain chip from his Neuralink startup, delivered an all-electric semitrailer from Tesla Inc., planned rocket launches at SpaceX and personally got involved in a high-profile account suspension at Twitter Inc., among much other activity.
It all highlighted an aspect common to Mr. Musk’s ventures, what some closer observers call “Elon Standard Time.”
That somewhat-joking, somewhat-on-the-nose shorthand refers to Mr. Musk’s habit of promising a new product or feature in the near term, which ends up being pushed off to a fuzzy future date—weeks, months or even years later.
Supporters say it is an example of how the world’s richest man motivates his teams to accomplish tasks that might have seemed impossible—such as landing rockets with SpaceX or building Tesla into a profitable electric-car giant.
Mr. Musk, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, in the past attributed his missed deadlines to the same optimism that enables him to take on daunting tasks.
The latest delay happened Friday. Mr. Musk had set that as the tentative date for the relaunch of a beefed-up version of the company’s Twitter Blue subscription service, an effort that could make the platform less reliant on advertising dollars, but as of late Saturday the rollout hadn’t happened.
It was the third scheduling lapse for Twitter Blue since Mr. Musk completed his Twitter acquisition in late October. Advertisers were told by Twitter employees that the relaunch could come this week, according to people familiar with the matter.
Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment about the subscription service and the deadlines.
Mr. Musk is racing to remake the social-media company as what he calls Twitter 2.0. As part of that, he cut half the workforce, and many other employees left on their own when offered a choice between severance and “long hours at high intensity.” Advertisers are pulling back in the midst of concern about the platform’s content-moderation strategies and the general pace of change, as Twitter faces losses.
This past week was a stark example of all the plates Mr. Musk now has spinning. At Twitter, he also battled with the tech colossus Apple Inc. and personally announced the suspension of Kanye West’s account after the rapper and designer posted an anti-Semitic image.
At Tesla, Mr. Musk came through on one of his big promises with the delivery of the electric truck—albeit three years after he initially said it would arrive.
“Sorry for the delay,” Mr. Musk told a crowd gathered Thursday night for the Semi delivery at Tesla’s factory outside Reno, Nev. “The sheer amount of drama between…five years ago and now is insane. A lot has happened in the world, but here we are, and it is real.”
The night before the Semi celebration, Mr. Musk held an event in Fremont, Calif., for Neuralink to show off the work of his brain-computer company with a video of “telepathic typing” from a monkey that had a Neuralink implant. In 2019, Mr. Musk predicted that the company could begin human testing as soon as 2020. On Thursday, he said it should now be six months away.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as Mr. Musk’s rocket company is formally known, had more routine delays, postponing a launch planned for this past Thursday using one of its Falcon 9 rockets after conducting additional inspections of the booster and reviewing data, according to a tweet. SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The company said Tuesday on Twitter that it conducted another major engine test for Starship, the rocket system it has been developing. While Mr. Musk has discussed possible dates for the first-ever Starship orbital flight, the company hasn’t attempted such a mission yet.
Delays in rocket-development programs aren’t uncommon, and Mr. Musk has made several predictions that have come and gone for his space ambitions.
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, has said delays are worth it to ensure that technical goals are met. “We have achieved everything we have wanted to—never in the timeline,” Ms. Shotwell said earlier this year at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “We fail on timeline, but that feels like the right fail to make, as opposed to not achieving what you’re trying to achieve.”
Maikel Mertens, a Tesla owner in the Netherlands, created a parody website in 2019—elontime.io—which makes light of how Mr. Musk’s timelines tend to stretch. He has dubbed his website the “Elon Time Converter,” which jokingly promises to calculate “the time drift between the Elon timezone…and the universal timezone.” A user enters a promised time, and the website cheekily pops out what it might mean. Six months, for example, might be two years.
Some people aren’t laughing. Tesla faced litigation over bullish statements that Mr. Musk made about increasing Model 3 car production only to see months of delays and headaches. Tesla denied wrongdoing, and the lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge, who noted that Mr. Musk had qualified his projections. “Federal securities laws do not punish companies for failing to achieve their targets,” the judge wrote.
In 2018, a Tesla shareholder at the company’s annual meeting asked Mr. Musk about deadlines. “As a long-term investor, I hate to say this, but I feel like my trust in Tesla’s timelines sort of eroded a little bit with the Model 3 ramp,” the man said. “So should I keep discounting things on Elon time or…have you learned anything about this?”
“I do have…an issue with time,” Mr. Musk responded. He said his younger brother, Kimbal Musk, would have to be creative with him as children to catch the bus, telling him it was earlier than it actually was.
Mr. Musk chalked it up to his being a naturally optimistic person, added that he probably wouldn’t have pursued the seemingly impossible effort of breaking into the worlds of car-making and rocket-launching if he were any other way.
“I kind of say when I think it can occur, but then I’m typically optimistic about these things,” he said. “Like it pretty much always happens but not exactly on the time frame.”
—Patience Haggin, Micah Maidenberg and Alexa Corse contributed to this article.
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The 28% increase buoyed the country as it battled on several fronts but investment remains down from 2021
3 min
As the war against Hamas dragged into 2024, there were worries here that investment would dry up in Israel’s globally important technology sector, as much of the world became angry against the casualties in Gaza and recoiled at the unstable security situation.
In fact, a new survey found investment into Israeli technology startups grew 28% last year to $10.6 billion. The influx buoyed Israel’s economy and helped it maintain a war footing on several battlefronts.
The increase marks a turnaround for Israeli startups, which had experienced a decline in investments in 2023 to $8.3 billion, a drop blamed in part on an effort to overhaul the country’s judicial system and the initial shock of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack.
Tech investment in Israel remains depressed from years past. It is still just a third of the almost $30 billion in private investments raised in 2021, a peak after which Israel followed the U.S. into a funding market downturn.
Any increase in Israeli technology investment defied expectations though. The sector is responsible for 20% of Israel’s gross domestic product and about 10% of employment. It contributed directly to 2.2% of GDP growth in the first three quarters of the year, according to Startup Nation Central—without which Israel would have been on a negative growth trend, it said.
“If you asked me a year before if I expected those numbers, I wouldn’t have,” said Avi Hasson, head of Startup Nation Central, the Tel Aviv-based nonprofit that tracks tech investments and released the investment survey.
Israel’s tech sector is among the world’s largest technology hubs, especially for startups. It has remained one of the most stable parts of the Israeli economy during the 15-month long war, which has taxed the economy and slashed expectations for growth to a mere 0.5% in 2024.
Industry investors and analysts say the war stifled what could have been even stronger growth. The survey didn’t break out how much of 2024’s investment came from foreign sources and local funders.
“We have an extremely innovative and dynamic high tech sector which is still holding on,” said Karnit Flug, a former governor of the Bank of Israel and now a senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute, a think tank. “It has recovered somewhat since the start of the war, but not as much as one would hope.”
At the war’s outset, tens of thousands of Israel’s nearly 400,000 tech employees were called into reserve service and companies scrambled to realign operations as rockets from Gaza and Lebanon pounded the country. Even as operations normalized, foreign airlines overwhelmingly cut service to Israel, spooking investors and making it harder for Israelis to reach their customers abroad.
An explosion in negative global sentiment toward Israel introduced a new form of risk in doing business with Israeli companies. Global ratings firms lowered Israel’s credit rating over uncertainty caused by the war.
Israel’s government flooded money into the economy to stabilize it shortly after war broke out in October 2023. That expansionary fiscal policy, economists say, stemmed what was an initial economic contraction in the war’s first quarter and helped Israel regain its footing, but is now resulting in expected tax increases to foot the bill.
The 2024 boost was led by investments into Israeli cybersecurity companies, which captured about 40% of all private capital raised, despite representing only 7% of Israeli tech companies. Many of Israel’s tech workers have served in advanced military-technology units, where they can gain experience building products. Israeli tech products are sometimes tested on the battlefield. These factors have led to its cybersecurity companies being dominant in the global market, industry experts said.
The number of Israeli defense-tech companies active throughout 2024 doubled, although they contributed to a much smaller percentage of the overall growth in investments. This included some startups which pivoted to the area amid a surge in global demand spurred by the war in Ukraine and at home in Israel. Funding raised by Israeli defense-tech companies grew to $165 million in 2024, from $19 million the previous year.
“The fact that things are literally battlefield proven, and both the understanding of the customer as well as the ability to put it into use and to accelerate the progress of those technologies, is something that is unique to Israel,” said Hasson.
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