- Elon Musk said it’s “very annoying” when journalists debunk his predictions about the future.
- “These are just guesses, people shouldn’t hold me to these things,” he said in an interview.
- Musk has been adversarial with the media, repeatedly calling out coverage of Tesla car failures.
Elon Musk called out journalists for debunking his predictions, claiming that on average he’s most likely more wrong than right.
“If you list my sins, I sound like the worst person on Earth. But if you put those against the things I’ve done right, it makes much more sense, you know,” Musk said in a video interview published Monday with Chris Anderson, head of conference organizers TED.
Musk described it as “very annoying when that happens.”
“What tends to happen is I’ll make some best guess and then in five years there will be some jerk that writes some article: ‘Elon said this would happen and it didn’t happen! He’s a liar and a fool!'” Musk said.
“These are just guesses, people shouldn’t hold me to these things,” he said.
He said that he believes journalists ignore his predictions that are correct and instead focus on his mistakes.
“Essentially, the longer you do anything, the more mistakes that you will make cumulatively. Which, if you sum up those mistakes, will sound like I’m the worst predictor ever,” he said.
Musk said he thinks he is wrongly criticized for mistaking how long something would take.
“The point is not that it was a few years late, but that it happened at all,” he said.
This is not the first time Musk has taken a jab at journalists. The Tesla co-founder has repeatedly criticized the coverage of Tesla cars crashing while on autopilot.
He said that coverage was “irresponsible,” arguing that it could lead people to miss out on the potential or self-driven cars to be safer those operated by humans.