Elon Meets His Match

He’s been able to bend reality to his whim. Delaware contract law looks to be the exception

On the evening of Sept. 30, a Friday, the world’s wealthiest man stood on a stage in Palo Alto and showed off a humanoid robot. Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., had first announced the effort a year earlier, promising it would usher in a revolution in artificial intelligence by presenting a robot that was really a dancer wearing a costume. This time a “production unit” of the droid, dubbed Optimus, had to be wheeled out by three engineers because its legs didn’t seem to work yet.

Under normal circumstances, shortcomings such as this would be no big deal for Musk, who has for decades used his gonzo marketing instincts to create the celebrated Silicon Valley effect known as a “reality distortion field”—the perception that the regular rules and limitations don’t apply. Nobody has been able to distort reality as much as Musk has. In the past, when he’s shown up with a barely functional prototype, the crowd of fans has gone berserk, the meme stockers have pushed up the share price, and Tesla has secured a lot of preorders that add to its basically unlimited supply of working capital.