The criticism of Musk's timelines is legitimate and this site has said so consistently: he does over-promise on dates, and Mars is a prime example. Around 2016–2017 he floated crewed Mars landings as early as 2024; that did not happen and was never realistic on that schedule. If the point is "discount Musk's specific dates heavily," that's fair and correct. What the "broken promise, therefore fraud" leap ignores is what those dates were and what actually got built. Musk's Mars timelines have always been explicitly aspirational "if everything goes right" targets, not contractual commitments — and the vehicle to get there, Starship, has gone from concept to the largest rocket ever flown, with multiple integrated test flights and a first-ever booster tower-catch, while NASA selected a Starship variant as its Artemis human lunar lander. In other words the program slipped years on schedule but advanced enormously in capability — the opposite of a vaporware scam where nothing is built. The honest verdict is mixed: the Mars dates were and are over-optimistic and deserve skepticism, but they sit on top of real, rapidly advancing hardware, and "he promised 2024 and delivered nothing" confuses an aggressive target with an empty one.