I think Elon says things fully expecting them to become true.
Whenever I hear him say "I'm confident that X will happen by Y", I mentally add "provided that every single engineer at [one of his companies] puts in 20 hour days for 2 years and manages to solve a mountain of problems that have never been solved before."
Sometimes it works, which unfortunately encourages the behavior.
I think Elon says things fully expecting them to become true.
Whenever I hear him say "I'm confident that X will happen by Y", I mentally add "provided that every single engineer at [one of his companies] puts in 20 hour days for 2 years and manages to solve a mountain of problems that have never been solved before."
Sometimes it works, which unfortunately encourages the behavior.