When Confidence Replaces Competence

The parallel fantasies of Musk and Trump, and the enormous cost of believing them

Elon Musk has spent the better part of a decade selling the idea that he alone can deliver humanity from its limitations. In the mythology he’s built around himself, he is the visionary, the futurist, the world-historic figure whose genius will propel us to new worlds and new destinies. It is a persona crafted from spectacle, certainty, and theatrics, not from results, and two recent interviews finally laid bare just how hollow that persona has become.

A Forbes interview with senior editor Alan Ohnsman reveals the first crack in the façade: the Cybercab, Musk’s promised fully autonomous robo-taxi with no steering wheel, no pedals, no mirrors, no controls, and, as it turns out, no legal path to existence. It is a product that exists only in PowerPoints, renderings, and Musk’s voice. The real world, with its regulations, engineering standards, and physics, has not been invited.

Ohnsman notes the obvious: U.S. federal motor vehicle safety standards explicitly require all the equipment Musk insists the Cybercab will not have. When Ohnsman contacted federal regulators at NHTSA to ask whether Tesla had applied for the exemption required to even test such a vehicle on public roads, their response was stunning in its simplicity. Tesla had never contacted them at all. Not once.