Experts are wrong all the time. The experts said that solar prices would come down but were off by nearly an order of magnitude in how long it took.
With something this hard it's extremely tough to tell for sure when it will happen and often progress goes in chunks where it seems like it's going to happen but then doesnt.
Many experts predicted price declines with pretty fair accuracy. The large groups of experts that were making these forecasts for purposes of global planning for mitigation of climate change were often intentionally conservative because the danger of planning with that assumption outweighs anything you lose by making more conservative predictions.
Experts have a narrow, deep view while CEOs have a wide, shallow view.
If the expert works in a lab developing new experimental solar panels they probably don’t see a clear path to mass production.
The CEO might know another manufacturing expert that does see a path to production and have enough high level understanding to know the methods are compatible.
In this case yes, but in this case we have to assume the research side has achieved it's goal (its proven a material exists with the desired properties), now it is a manufacturing problem. If the lab can't produce the material, the manufacturing lines have nothing to manufacture with. And that seems to be the case with FSD. CEOs make wild claims, but the tech isn't there. The material has not been proven to exist in a lab with the desired properties.
Like a CEO saying, I have a material that can protect wearers from nuclear fusion blasts and it will be on the market in 6 months, but the experts in the field have yet to actually prove that material exists and create it in a lab.
But the point is that we are all equally capable of being wrong. Especially when we step outside our area of expertise. CEOs are just another type of expert but their domain is organization. We have to consider the source’s experience relative to the domain in question before we can decide if their prediction is trustworthy.
Both might be equally capable but the incentives are entirely different. An Engineer is motivated to deliver accurate predictions because that's their job. A CEO is not motivated to deliver accurate predictions because their main job is to hype their product and services.
In this case the actual CEO we all know we're talking about is a serial confabulist who publicly agrees with anti semitic conspiracy theories and tells his advertisers to go fuck themselves, so your abstract hypothetical arguments generously giving some unspecified billionaire CEO the benefit of the doubt don't hold any water.
He also does dubiously claim to be an expert in many fields, although despite the success of the engineers working for him, his greatest personal expertise appears to be sycophant creation — competence can only propel one so far.
Although one should never believe the ravings, useful work does surprisingly often nucleate around them, just not to the degree or with the speed promised.
With something this hard it's extremely tough to tell for sure when it will happen and often progress goes in chunks where it seems like it's going to happen but then doesnt.