Almost eight years ago, Elon Musk announced that every Tesla made from that moment forward would be capable of Level 5 autonomous driving with nothing more than a software update. It was a pivotal moment in Tesla’s history, committing the company to not just succeed as an electric automaker, but solve one of the most ambitious AI and robotics challenges possible. To create confidence in that staggering aspiration, Tesla released a video of a Model X driving around Palo Alto autonomously to the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black,” claiming that the driver behind the wheel was only there “for legal purposes.”

Eight long and hype-filled years later, Tesla is still looking for ways to build confidence in its ability to deliver a “general solution to self-driving” through hype and spectacle, even as companies like Waymo deliver the reality of 100,000 driverless taxi rides per week. Rather than meeting the competitive challenge from Waymo with real driverless rides on real public streets, Tesla’s latest ploy for credibility sees the firm retreating ever deeper into fantasy, building what can only be described as a temporary theme park on a movie studio lot for its first ever “driverless” demonstration.

This contrast is instructive. The “Paint It Black” video of eight years ago was no more “real” or “fake” than yesterday’s “We, Robot” demonstration, but at least it had the pretense of reality: it depicted a real car on real roads. Tesla’s latest spectacle likely cost orders of magnitude more to produce, but it didn’t even purport to show any actual real-world capability. The entire thing was pure fantasy, in a contained fantasy world, built on a movie theater lot that exists for the sole purpose of producing such spectacles.

This trajectory, from simulating future capability on public roads to creating a fantasy world for fantasy cars to show off fantasy capabilities, should worry Tesla’s supporters. We can already see Musk retreating into a misinformation-fueled fantasy world every day on Twitter, and the jarring divisiveness of the Cybertruck suggests that his runaway ego is already making Tesla’s products less palatable. If Musk’s retreat into a self-soothing fantasy bubble is also making his hype game less effective, and the 8% drop in Tesla’s stock price suggests that it is, his most important skill set is on the line.

Of course, with Wall Street analysts almost universally declaring themselves “underwhelmed,” it has to be asked: what else could they have possibly expected? Did they really believe that now, after eight years of empty hype, fake statistics, and blown deadlines, Tesla would actually start providing credible evidence to back the litany of bullshit? Having made no effort to explain his chronic inability to meet (let alone stop making) his self-imposed deadlines, and facing no real consequences for nearly a decade of what is either unprecedented public delusion or deception, why on earth would Elon Musk make a serious play for credibility now?

Having drawn a poor hand eight years ago, Elon Musk is playing poker the only way he knows how: going all-in on every hand. This strategy has created a confidence game of unprecedented proportions in our financial markets, as every gambler in the casino wants to put a chip on the guy going all-in and winning every time, and only the $13 billion of hung debt for the Twitter deal suggests his hot streak might ever end. All Musk has to do to keep the music playing is to project confidence, which is infinitely easier to do in a studio lot setpiece than out on public roads.

For everyone not locked into this financial-cognitive nightmare, it’s hard to imagine anyone seriously believing that a night of delusional Disney Adult cringe might actually inflate Tesla’s stock beyond the current ~$680 billion valuation. Given that Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” is already the subject of a multi-year federal investigation into securities and wire fraud, We, Robot’s blatant fantasy-mongering is downright shocking. If anything, showing a low-speed, closed-course theme park ride in order to build confidence around Tesla’s progress toward actual real-world driverless capability is almost too childish to call a fraud.

Ultimately, Musk’s increasingly-degenerate gambling run is slouching toward one last big coinflip: the 2024 presidential election. With Musk going “all-in” on Donald Trump, and musing that he will end up in a prison cell if Kamala Harris is elected, it’s clear that his main political issue is his freedom to keep rolling over his endless confidence game without legal consequences. If Trump wins and delivers Musk the impunity he craves, the line between amusement park fantasy and $700 billion self-driving juggernaut will all but disappear, and we will all find ourselves living in Muskworld’s house of mirrors.