I’ve made a few predictions over the years here, and I want to talk about two of them.

I’m declaring victory in saying that 2022 was *not* the Year Twitter Died. It was an extremely broad opinion in the left-of-center spaces that Musk was a terrible CEO, that firing so much Twitter staff would destroy the company, that it would be dead and overtaken very soon. I can concede the first one, the second two are clearly false.

The evidence from history has shown that firing most of Twitter’s staff has *not* led to mass outages, mass hacks, or the death of twitter’s infrastructure. It may seem like I’m debating a strawman, but it’s difficult to really convey the ridiculous hysteria I saw, with some claiming that Twitter would soon be dead and abandoned as newer versions of most popular browsers wouldn’t be able to access it. Likewise it was claimed that the servers would be insecure and claimed by botnets, and would thus get blocked by any sane browser protection. None of that has happened, Twitter runs just as it did in 2021. It is no less secure and it not blocked by most browsers.

Nor has the mass exodus of users really occurred. Some people think it has because they live in a bubble, but Mastodon was never going to replace Twitter and Bluesky is losing users. And regardless of your opinions on that, the numbers don’t lie.

I’ve said before that I used to be part of a community that routinely though Musk’s sky was falling. Every Tesla delay would be the moment that *finally* killed the company, every year would be when NASA *finally* kicked SpaceX to the curb, every failed Musk promise would *finally* make people stop listening to him. You’ve heard of fandoms, I was in a hatedom.

But I learned that all of that was motivated reasoning. EVs aren’t actually super easy, and that’s the reason Ford and GM utterly failed to build any. It’s not that Musk was lucky and would soon be steamrolled by the Big Boys, Musk was smart (and lucky) and the Big Boys wet their Big Boy pants and have stilled utterly failed in the EV market despite billions of dollars in free government money.

Did Musk receive free government money? Not targeted money no, any car company on earth could have benefited from the USA/California EV tax credits, it’s just that the Detroit automakers didn’t make EVs. Then they got handed targeted free money, and they still failed to make EVs.

NASA (and the ESA, and JAXA, and CNSA) haven’t managed to replicate SpaceX’s success in low-cost re-usable rockets sending thousands of satellites into orbit. So now *another* Musk property, Starlink, is the primary way that rural folk can get broadband, because Biden’s billions utterly failed to build any rural broadband.

And of course while Musk has turned most of the left against him, he has turned much of the right for him, which is generally what happens when you switch parties. And now that he’s left Trump, some of the left want to coax him back. Clearly people still listen to him even if you and I do not.

So I was very wrong 10 years ago about Elon Musk being the anti-Midas, but I learned my lesson and started stepping out of my bubble. I was right 3 years ago when I said Twitter isn’t dying, and everything I said still rings true. Big companies still use Twitter because it’s their best way to mass-blast their message to everyone in an age when TV is dying and more people block ads with their browser. The same reason people prefer Bluesky (curate your feed, never see what you don’t want to see) is the same reason Wendy’s, Barstool Sports, and Kendrick Lamar prefer Twitter. They want their message, their brand, to show up in your feed even if you don’t want to see it. It’s advertising that isn’t labeled as an ad.

So that’s what I was right about, now I’m going to write a lot *less* about what I was wrong about, because I hate being wrong.

I was wrong about how difficult it would be to get self-driving cars on all roads. In 2022 I clowned on a 2015 prediction that said self-driving cars would be on every road by 2020. Well it’s 2025, and I’ll be honest 5 years late isn’t that terrible.

At the time I thought that there was a *political-legal* barrier that would need to be overcome: how do you handle insurance of a self-driving car? No system is perfect and if there’s a defect in the LIDAR detector or just a bug in the system, a car *can* cause damage. And if it does, does Google pay the victim, or the passenger, or what? Insurance is a messy, expensive system, split into 50 different systems here in America, and I thought without some new insurance legislation (such as unifying the insurance systems or just creating more clarity regarding self-driving cars), that the companies would realize they couldn’t roll these out without massive risk and headaches.

I was wrong, I’ve now seen waymos in every city I’ve been to.

So it seems the insurance problems weren’t insurmountable, and the problem was less hard then I thought. You can read my thoughts about how hard I *thought* those problems were, but to be honest I was wrong.