DEEP DIVE 10 · TRAJECTORY PLOT
What's Next
The bets currently on the table — and an honest accounting of what nobody knows.
Starship and the Moon, then Mars
Starship is contracted for Artemis III — NASA’s planned crewed lunar landing. Orbital refueling, a successful lunar landing, and then the long-deferred Mars cargo missions are the sequence. Each step is a multi-year engineering program, whatever the public timelines say.
Robotaxis and Optimus
Tesla’s robotaxi program (unveiled October 2024 with the Cybercab concept) and the Optimus humanoid robot are Musk’s current “this changes everything” bets — autonomy and labor, the two largest cost pools in the economy. Both are pre-scale: robotaxi pilots are limited; Optimus is in development. Regulatory approval for unsupervised autonomy is the gating unknown.
Neuralink’s human trials
After the first implant (January 2024, Noland Arbaugh), the trial program is expanding toward more patients and, eventually, other indications (vision restoration is the stated next frontier). Regulatory and ethical scrutiny will track every step.
xAI vs. the frontier labs
xAI’s Grok competes directly with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The March 2025 acquisition of X gives it distribution; the open question is whether it can match the labs’ model quality and compute scale.
The genuinely unknown
- Whether unsupervised full self-driving clears regulators.
- Whether Starship hits its cost and cadence targets.
- Whether the Mars timelines ever converge with reality.
- What role, if any, Musk plays in government again after DOGE.
Source notes
Program statuses from company announcements (Tesla AI Day / “We, Robot” event October 2024; SpaceX flight-test records; Neuralink updates); regulatory questions from public agency records and reporting. See sources.