How It Is Going

How It Started on 2023-10-20

At the end of October 2023, Elon Musk said that it would blow his mind if they don’t have X’s payment system rolled out by the end of 2024. Not just a payment system, but your entire financial life. The nugget: he wants it to be a “high-yield money market account.” (which means the potential to be a high-loss account, you cannot have high-yield without high-risk) Source: Ars Technica

How I See It Going

Why would a smart person give his money to a company that doesn’t pay its bills? Because there are a lot of people who are not smart. And Musk wants it to be a high-yield account, which basically means that you will gamble on some shady market with all your money. Sure, go ahead, make my day. I think even if Musk manages to get something going, he will face hurdles from regulators, and I hope so before he loses all the money of a few not smart people. So my bet is he will fail to deliver and blame his failure on regulators, but in reality it will be because his system is a shoddy piece of shit.

How It Is Going

How It Actually Went

Not there yet.

How It Started on 2022-06

In June 2022, McKinsey claimed that the Metaverse had the potential to generate up to 5 trillion (US Dollars) in value by 2030. Source: McKinsey’s website and report

Note the typical use of words such as “potential” and “could”, which means that the big number is just a wild guess pulled out of their collective asses to generate buzz. This type of unsubstantiated claim is exactly what leads to bubbles.

How I See It Going

To the best of my knowledge, even Mark Zuckerberg, who renamed his Facebook empire “Meta” and said the Metaverse was the future, has already admitted defeat, or at least has considerably scaled down his ambitions. The Metaverse is not new, Second Life was its first incarnation in 2003. Even if “experts” decide to label every single online activity as the Metaverse (e-commerce, social media, online gaming, browsing, etc.) it will not be worth 5 trillion Dollars in 2030. But at least you’ll have this site to remember this wild prediction.

How It Is Going as of 2023-10-05

You not spending much time in the Metaverse? Me neither.

How It Actually Went

Not there yet.

How It Started on 2023-04-19

During the Q1 2023 earnings call on April 19, 2023, Elon Musk announced that the first Cybertruck deliveries would take place in Q3 2023. Technically, that means September 30th latest. Source: Electrek

How I See It Going

Nope. Won’t happen.

How It Is Going as of 2023-09-27

Between Q1 and Q3 Elon complained that building Cybertrucks was hard. Source: Ars Technica

How It Actually Went on 2023-09-30

Here we are. To nobody’s surprise, Q3 went by and not a single Cybertruck was delivered to customers. My bet is that during the next earnings call, Elon will claim that the first Cybertrucks will be delivered sometime in 2024. At one point he will complain again that making Cybertrucks is hard.

How It Started on 2023-09-12

During the iPhone event of September 2023, Apple made a movie claiming it plans to be carbon neutral by 2030. Source: as of September 2023, it’s right there on their YouTube channel.

How I See It Going

They will not reach that goal, not by a long shot. When you are one of the biggest producers of electronics on the planet, it is impossible, especially when you are (mostly) against the right to repair and design devices with very low repairability scores. It’s wishful thinking at best and pure PR bullshit at worst. At some point, the movie will be discreetly removed from Apple’s materials.

How It Is Going

Not there yet.

How It Actually Went

Not there yet.

How it is going is based on a simple idea: corporations make a lot of promises. Carbon neutrality. Inclusivity. Responsibility. They promise to revolutionize the world with millions of robotaxis and full self-driving. They say they’re going to make smartphones obsolete with a little something in your pocket. Having observed this game for several years, I can say this: the main goal of many (but not all) of these press releases is to (a) get free publicity and (b) reduce the psychological guilt of potential buyers.

This is how I got the idea of “How it is going.” I’m going to track the press releases promises of several companies:

• What they promised, when, and for which deadline.
• What my prognosis is: from “yep totally going to do it” to “utter bullshit.”
• We reach the set deadline I’m going to document what they actually achieved.

There are the companies that are true to their word. There are the companies that actually mean well but set goals that they know are unattainable. And there are the companies that plainly lie. When possible, I intend to make a distinction between companies based on their past track record.

The irony is that I have no idea how this project will be going. This is just a start. I know I need to make a few changes to the architecture of my blog to add tags per company, dates, etc., but I think an imperfect start is better than waiting forever to implement the project. So let the good times roll!