Or did he?
If you ask Polymarket, where $7.2 million in bets have been placed over the past four weeks on a June launch, the resounding answer is no.
One account, for example, purchased 420,000 shares at an average of around 12 cents—each cent is equivalent to one percentage point of probability. Were that individual to liquidate now prior to expiry, they stand to lose 86% of their wager.
The missing puzzle piece that could change that all in an instant were if Musk opened the service up to all Austin residents. Under the terms of the bet, that is the threshold that must be met in order for the rollout to qualify.
That too doesn’t qualify.
“A program that is restricted to Tesla employees, invite-only testers, closed-beta participants, factory self-delivery features, or the mere release of Full Self-Driving software for private owner-drivers will not qualify,” the site states in its terms.
This is the simplicity of Polymarket. Unlike equity investments where a stock can still price in future cash flows without the corresponding target actually being achieved on deadline, there is no moving the goalpost with prediction markets.
Once the terms are announced, either the agreed upon criteria are met or they are not—the outcome is always binary.
While a missed wager doesn’t diminish the accomplishments these past few days of Tesla—which did not respond to a request for comment—the issue is more than just semantic.
Musk’s core promise to differentiate Tesla from competitors like Google’s Waymo is an ability to scale exponentially overnight once the AI-enabled technology proves itself safe.
While Waymo has to first acquire cars like the Jaguar I-Pace EV and then fit them with costly sensors and computing power, there’s no need for that when it comes to Tesla, according to Musk. The vehicles have already been built and delivered to customer hands. They are simply waiting to be awakened.
Instead the CEO still is keeping a tight leash on which customers can use his limited robotaxi fleet. For now, that’s one big promise Musk still needs to deliver.
