Elon Musk, entrepreneur and PR genius, has done it again. He boldly predicted that the arrival of a self-driving car was just three years away. The press took note, and Mr. Musk found himself on the front page of the Financial Times. His gambit shows that an outlandish statement can have a very practical purpose.
Self-driving cars have been in the news, largely as a result of Google’s prototype. But it wasn’t until Mr. Musk made his bold prediction that the story moved from the tech and science section to the front page.
A bold prediction like this and the headlines it produced yield a lot of benefits for Musk. It burnishes his image as a visionary tech entrepreneur, and it generates welcome attention for his company, Tesla Motors, and its growing fleet of electric vehicles.
Making big prediction sounds risky but it actually is a fairly safe strategy. For one thing, no one is likely to call Mr. Musk to account three years from now if self-driving cars aren’t adorning driveways across the land. It is also a way to thwart Google, which is trying to commercialize a driverless vehicle, and galvanize Mr. Musk’s colleagues to push ahead with a rival design.
Predicting something in the short-term is much riskier, of course. Meredith Whitney, the financial analyst, brought the municipal bond market to its knees with the dire prediction that many state and local governments soon would go bankrupt. It didn’t happen, and she has vanished from the public stage.
Here are some tips for making a headline-grabbing prediction:
1. Stay within your range. Musk doesn’t make big statements about medicine, politics or fashion (or if he does no one notices). Tech is his thing, and that’s where he can command attention.
2. Keep it simple. Stating a clear goal makes your message memorable. There’s no better example than President Kennedy’s goal for the space program: ‘to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth.’ It was clear, easily understood and wildly ambitious.
3. Include just enough reality. Musk’s statements about driverless cars came at a time when they had been in the news, so his remarks landed in fertile soil. Pick an issue that’s trending and amplify it.
It helps that Mr. Musk has a knack for making amazing things happen, not just predicting them. Starting a successful electric vehicle company definitely qualifies him to speak about the future. After all, he’s a guy who is making the future happen.