Twitter, Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX: A Week Running on Musk Time

The past week offered a dizzying display of Elon Musk's multitasking range. In the space of a few days, he showed off a monkey typing using a brain chip from his Neuralink startup, delivered an all-electric semitrailer from Tesla Inc., planned rocket launches at SpaceX and personally got involved in a high-profile account suspension at Twitter Inc., among much other activity. It all highlighted an aspect common to Mr. Musk's ventures, what some closer observers call "Elon Standard Time." That somewhat-joking, somewhat-on-the-nose shorthand refers to Mr. Musk's habit of promising a new product or feature in the near term, which ends up being pushed off to a fuzzy future date--weeks, months or even years later. Supporters say it is an example of how the world's richest man motivates his teams to accomplish tasks that might have seemed impossible--such as landing rockets with SpaceX or building Tesla into a profitable electric-car giant.