4 of Elon Musk's Boldest Predictions - Stocks in the News

Elon Musk isn't known for being modest. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX likes to dream big, and sometimes he makes some bold predictions about the future. Take a look at these four claims Musk has made in the last four years, ranging from the intriguing to the outrageous.  

The electric car company's lackluster earnings report wasn't the only thing that put Musk in the news Thursday. On the company's earnings call, he told analysts that Tesla's

market capitalization "would be basically the same as Apple's

is today" by 2025.

Musk expects the company's stock

over the next decade, pushing Tesla's current worth of $25 billion over the $700 billion record that Apple passed earlier this week. Call us conservative, but that seems a tad optimistic, especially since Tesla currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), which isn't exactly "insane." (

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That's about 10 years before NASA expects to arrive on the Red Planet. But in a 2011 video interview with the Wall Street Journal, Musk said that the 2021 arrival date was SpaceX's

. (15-20 years was his worst-case prediction, which makes you wonder if NASA will ever get there.)

This is at least plausible. Musk believes the future of American ground transportation

, Inc.com reported, and the fossil fuel era will remembered the way we think of the steam engine today. Efficient batteries – in his mind probably the batteries under development by Tesla – will turn all fuel obsolete, with the exception of rockets for space travel. It might even be possible, Musk added, to create an electric supersonic aircraft, allowing the technology to spread to the skies too. (

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We're hoping this one isn't true. But Musk has been adamant about the coming danger of artificial intelligence, saying that we are five years – 10 years at most – away from

developing, according to Business Insider. The pace of progress for artificial intelligence has been almost exponential, and that worries Musk. Here's how it could play out: If a robot's function is to eliminate email spam, and it thinks the best way to get rid of spam to get rid of humans … then we might be in Musk's apocalypse scenario. 

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