Ryan's Journal

Year 17 of my annual tradition of making predictions about the coming year is now complete, with the usual horrendous result. I took some big swings and struck out over and over again. For reference, here are the original predictions.

1. SpaceX will have 10-15 launches of its new Starship rocket by the end of the year, with at least one ship re-used.

   WRONG. After three straight first stage explosions and a test stand explosion that limited their ability to do static fires, SpaceX ended the year with just five launches of their giant new rocket in 2025. I’ve been really disappointed in Elon Musk since his purchase of Twitter and his decision to pivot Tesla’s mission, but I still give him a lot of credit for starting a company that has revolutionized the space industry and given hope that we might achieve the future envisioned in 2001: A Space Odyssey during my lifetime.

2. The Browns will trade back from the #2 overall pick in the 2025 NFL draft and won’t draft a quarterback with their first selection.

   CORRECT. The 2025 NFL Draft was the best in memory for the Browns. They picked up several players who look like future stars, grabbed an extra first round pick by fleecing the Jaguars in a trade for the #2 pick, and waited until late in the draft to pick a quarterback.

3. The Fantastic Four: First Steps will be a return to form for Marvel, and will gross over $1.2 billion worldwide and over $600 million domestically.

   WRONG. Fantastic Four grossed $275 million domestically and another $247 million globally. I waited to watch it on streaming, and somehow Marvel made a group of superheroes that they are supposedly deeply proud of into a beautiful but totally forgettable movie.

4. A bubble in commercial real estate will seriously threaten the financial sector by the end of the year.

   WRONG. While the commercial real estate market isn’t strong by any measure, there also doesn’t seem to be an imminent danger of collapse. At some point all of the AI companies are going to have to show how they can turn their giant new data centers into profits, but at least for now there isn’t an obvious threat to the wider financial sector.

5. Most of Trump’s cabinet nominees, including controversial picks like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel, will be confirmed, but Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr will both be forced to withdraw.

   WRONG. He got everyone he wanted including Gabbard and RFK. RFK in particular has been horrifying to me, but it takes a while for the impacts of poor leadership to become apparent, and I worry that it might be a decade or more before his attacks on health science will show up in future epidemics and a limited ability to fight them.

6. While industrywide electric vehicle sales numbers will continue to climb, Tesla’s sales will fall both globally and domestically by at least 10-15% in 2025.

   WRONG. I overestimated the damage that’s been done to Tesla’s standing as their deliveries fell by 8.6% in 2025. That’s a huge fall, especially when industry-wide electric car sales were up over 20% globally, but it’s short of the predicted 10-15% fall.

7. The number of active users on Bluesky will surpass Facebook’s Threads by the end of the year, but won’t (quite) overtake Twitter X.

   WRONG. Bluesky ended the year with about 40 million users, and while it’s tougher to estimate the number of Threads users with the way the Facebook combines its services, the number is definitely higher than Bluesky.

8. 2025 will see the elimination of the debt ceiling.

   WRONG. I really thought that Trump might do something I support and push to get rid of the debt ceiling since it forces Republicans to cast votes for something that they have spent their careers describing as an irresponsible evil, but instead they just increased it by a massive $5 trillion while cutting taxes as part of their One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

9. Boeing will sell or spin off its space division.

   WRONG. While their new CEO has made some solid moves to get the company back on track, the troubled space division wasn’t up for sale in 2025 despite failures to compete with SpaceX or to fulfill their Starliner commitments for sending crew to the ISS.

10. The new Superman movie will underperform, with earnings similar to the 2017 Justice League movie.

    CORRECT. The new Superman movie earned $354 million domestically and another $262 internationally, about $50 million less than the $661 million that Justic League made. While neither of those numbers are small, they weren’t the massive hits that the studio was hoping for given the giant budgets and character appeal of each film.

11. The high-speed train between LA-ish and Las Vegas will start major construction and actually gain support from Republicans.

    WRONG. Construction of the Las Vegas station is underway, but aside from that there isn’t a lot of activity on the new Brightline West line, and politicians have been mostly silent about the project.

12. Lebron James will announce that he will retire after the 2025-2026 NBA season.

    WRONG. At the time of writing Lebron is averaging the lowest points and rebounds per game since his rookie year, but there’s been no announcement that he’s planning to retire. I am forever grateful that he went back to Cleveland and won a championship there, but I’d like to see him go out as a still-great player rather than hanging on a little too long.

13. The NASA Space Launch System (SLS) will be on the chopping block by the end of the year.

    WRONG. After a spat between Trump and Elon NASA went without an administrator for most of 2025, so there hasn’t been any change in the status of SLS.

14. American men will break the national records in the 800m, 1500m, 5000m and 10,000m.

    WRONG. While they had the talent to break a lot of records in 2025, the stars didn’t align. The national records in the 5,000 meters and the marathon were both broken, but setting records in all five distance events was an admittedly tall order.

15. The trend of billionaires buying media companies will continue with at least one huge purchase.

    WRONG. After buying Paramount, and with it CBS, Larry Ellison’s son tried to get Warner Brothers, and with it CNN, in 2025, but at least for now it looks like Netflix will be the winner in that acquisition.

Final score: 2/15. I think that’s the worst ever, but just wait for the 2026 predictions to set a new low. Looking back, none of the predictions seem too outlandish, so at least I can feel like I was totally wrong but with style.

Below is the 17th entry in my yearly tradition of making (bad) predictions. While a smarter man would have admitted defeat long ago, it’s an exercise I enjoy despite being horrendous at it. So without further ado, here are some thoughts about the coming year.

1. SpaceX will have 10-15 launches of its new Starship rocket by the end of the year, with at least one ship re-used.
   
   SpaceX launched four test flights in 2024, and at this point the first stage has already landed successfully once, while the second stage is getting close. They have stated that they want to launch 25 flights in 2025, but 15 would still be an amazing accomplishment and is probably more within the realm of reality. It’s a great time to be alive if you’re a fan of space.
   
2. The Browns will trade back from the #2 overall pick in the 2025 NFL draft and won’t draft a quarterback with their first selection.
   
   In my perfect world, Deion Sanders announces that his son won’t play for Cleveland, a bidding war breaks out between the Giants, Jets and Raiders for the #2 pick, and Cleveland ends up with Las Vegas’ #6 overall, their second and third rounders, and a 2026 second round pick. The Browns then draft a manimal with their first pick and take Jaxson Dart with one of their two second-rounders. He sits behind Kirk Cousins for a year, and we all live happily ever after. But it’s the Browns, so there’s an equally good chance that they draft a QB #2 and he goes on to easily break the rookie record by throwing more than 28 interceptions in his first season.
   
3. The Fantastic Four: First Steps will be a return to form for Marvel, and will gross over $1.2 billion worldwide and over $600 million domestically.
   
   The folks at Marvel have been excited to do a Fantastic Four movie since forever, so they should be highly motivated not to screw this one up. In the past five years their movies have been a mess of too many characters, not enough focus on compelling stories, and a lack of cohesion between movies. With this movie set in the 1960s they won’t be tempted to pull in other characters, so the film should be focused on just the Fantastic Four and will tell a story that is worth going to a theater for.
   
4. A bubble in commercial real estate will seriously threaten the financial sector by the end of the year.
   
   Since COVID, office buildings are operating at low occupancy rates, and with leases coming up for renewal companies are going to walk away, and some developers will then choose to default on their loans. Much like the subprime mortgage crisis in 2010, since the defaulted properties won’t have demand the banks will be left with properties worth less than the original loan amount, and there will be serious impacts on balance sheets.
   
5. Most of Trump’s cabinet nominees, including controversial picks like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel, will be confirmed, but Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr will both be forced to withdraw.
   
   As the Matt Gaetz nomination showed, Republican Senators aren’t going to support nominees that they have strong objections to, but they also don’t want to go on record against Trump, so if there really is resistance to Gabbard and RFK then their nominations will be delayed, allowing time for information like RFK’s fringe views on vaccines and diets, and Gabbard’s sympathetic views of Russia, to weaken their support.
   
6. While industrywide electric vehicle sales numbers will continue to climb, Tesla’s sales will fall both globally and domestically by at least 10-15% in 2025.
   
   Tesla has pioneered a revolution in automobiles, demonstrating that electric cars are a superior solution to gasoline vehicles. However, in the last five years the Cybertruck design has been hugely divisive, Elon has made an annual unfulfilled promise that the cars will drive themselves by the end of the year, they have put a weird focus on humanoid robots, and meanwhile their car designs are getting long in the tooth. At the same time, the CEO’s newfound enthusiasm for a President-elect who calls climate change a hoax and chants “drill baby drill” at his rallies is not a good way to increase brand loyalty for a company whose mission is still supposedly to “advance the world’s transition to sustainable energy”. Tesla’s sales in 2024 disappointed despite lots of year-end incentives and a rush of people trying to take advantage of federal EV tax breaks, and 2025 may be another slow year for Tesla’s automotive division.
   
7. The number of active users on Bluesky will surpass Facebook’s Threads by the end of the year, but won’t (quite) overtake Twitter X.
   
   I used the pre-Elon Twitter as a way to get insights from authors, engineers, political scientists and others. Additionally, it was an amazing source of immediate news coverage – an obscure USGS scientist was always online if an earthquake occurred or a volcano erupted, and a former astronaut always weighed in when there was notable space news. Post-Elon most of the people I followed left Twitter, but in the past couple of months they are starting to show up on Bluesky and seem likely to bring their former Twitter followers with them.
   
8. 2025 will see the elimination of the debt ceiling.
   
   I’m not confident in this prediction, but here’s my thinking: the debt ceiling has to be raised while Trump is President since the US isn’t going to cut a trillion dollars from the annual budget. There are a number of House Republicans who don’t ever want their names attached to a debt ceiling vote, so raising it has to be done with help from Democrats. That gives the Democrats leverage, and since Trump already floated the idea of getting rid of the debt ceiling altogether, Democrats will finally have an opportunity to remove a time bomb from the budget process.
   
9. Boeing will sell or spin off its space division.
   
   Starliner was delayed several years and then had thruster issues that left two astronauts stranded on the space station for six months. SpaceX is getting the bulk of all launch contracts, and Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket will be operational soon. It’s not clear what Boeing’s sales pitch for space is anymore, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see their new CEO exit the business by selling off their space division to focus on airplanes and defense.
   
10. The new Superman movie will underperform, with earnings similar to the 2017 Justice League movie.
    
    James Gunn seems to have his heart in the right place, but DC keeps prioritizing spectacle over story, and unless you’re James Cameron that isn’t a recipe for successful movies. The trailer for the new film seemed like it had a dozen different heroes and villains in it, which portends a movie aimed at setting up future films instead of telling a coherent story. The original Christopher Reeve film wasn’t beloved because of spectacle, it was beloved because it inspired us to imagine our world with Superman in it, but DC doesn’t seem to understand that fact. Hopefully I’m wrong about the new movie, because it would be great to be inspired by the Man of Steel once again.
    
11. The high-speed train between LA-ish and Las Vegas will start major construction and actually gain support from Republicans.
    
    Brightline West is a private company planning to build a high-speed train from the outskirts of LA along the I-15 median for 218 miles to Las Vegas. They have received $3 billion in federal grants, and claim the project can be completed for less than $20 billion and be operational by 2028. The cost will be higher and the opening date will be missed, but given Republican support for private businesses, Trump’s love of building stuff, and the fact that this train mostly runs through red districts, I’m betting we’ll be hearing a lot about it in the coming years.
    
12. Lebron James will announce that he will retire after the 2025-2026 NBA season.
    
    At 40 Lebron is still one of the best players in the NBA, but he’s also aware that he can’t play at a high level forever, and I’m pretty sure that he doesn’t want to go out with a whimper. If the Lakers somehow won the championship this year he’d probably retire after this season, but otherwise his current contract is through 2026, and he’ll likely want to announce his plans in advance so he can go out in front of sold-out arenas cheering for one of the top four players ever to play the game. And yeah, top four: Jordan #1, Wilt #2, Russell #3, Lebron #4.
    
13. The NASA Space Launch System (SLS) will be on the chopping block by the end of the year.
    
    The first flight of NASA’s SLS rocket launched in 2022, but the second flight that will carry humans around the moon has been pushed back to 2026. With Elon Musk playing an outsized role in the Trump administration, a space entrepreneur nominated to head NASA, and Richard Shelby having retired in 2023, this very expensive and slow moving program will be at serious risk of cancellation by the end of the year.
    
14. American men will break the national records in the 800m, 1500m, 5000m and 10,000m.
    
    Breaking four national records in one year is a tall ask, but what’s the fun in making safe predictions? Grant Fischer is the reigning record holder in the 5,000m and 10,000m and just won bronze medals in both events in Paris. Bryce Hoppel is the reigning 800m indoor world champion and American record holder. The 1500m record is likely the toughest of the four, but Americans won the bronze and gold medals in Paris with times that were only a fraction of a second from the record, so this year could very well see all four records rewritten.
    
15. The trend of billionaires buying media companies will continue with at least one huge purchase.
    
    Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, and Jeff Bezos took over the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013. Warner Brothers, and thus CNN, may soon be up for sale, and Elon Musk has suggested he would buy MSNBC, so with billionaires more and more interested in shaping media narratives, and with Trump likely to make it a difficult four years for journalists, this year may see another big sale.

And there they are, fifteen predictions about the new year. These took a shockingly long time to come up with, and they will almost certainly be embarrassingly wrong when revisited twelve months from now, but it’s a game I enjoy, and also a good annual affirmation that my talents are that of an engineer who focuses on solving immediate problems rather than trying to figure out what lies in the distant future.

Twelve months ago I continued the long tradition of making incorrect predictions about the coming year, and like most of the past sixteen years, the first journal entry of 2025 is a recap of how the 2024 predictions turned out (spoiler alert: DOH).

1. Joe Biden (or another Democrat if his health fails) will be elected President.

   WRONG. Given that “it’s the economy, stupid” still rings true, the Democrats should have held every campaign event at one of the dozens of new car, battery, or microchip plants that are being built as a result of the Inflation Reduction and CHIPS acts, but hindsight is 20/20. My caveat that Biden might not be the nominee was astute, but it took a long time for him to drop out and thus Americans decided to put the guy from Home Alone 2 back in charge.

2. Democrats will lose two Senate seats and lose control of the Senate.

   WRONG. Democrats lost a seat in West Virginia (as expected), but also lost seats in Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania for a net loss of four seats, giving Republicans a 53-47 advantage in the upper chamber.

3. Republicans will lose the House of Representatives, with Democrats gaining a thin majority of between 2-10 seats.

   WRONG. Democrats gained two seats but lost the chamber 220-215. Given how many Republicans will never be a “yes” vote for must-pass items like spending bills and debt ceiling increases, it’s going to be a wild ride for the next two years.

4. SpaceX’s Starship rocket will successfully deliver cargo to orbit but won’t have a successful landing.

   WRONG. While they haven’t yet tried to deliver cargo or land a second stage, SpaceX pulled off one of the greatest engineering feats of all time by catching a first-stage booster as it returned to the launchpad. Elon Musk seems to be following the Howard Hughes playbook by being a whacko eccentric who creates companies that change the world in amazing ways.

5. The US men’s Olympic basketball team will go undefeated, will win every game by at least fifteen points, and will romp to an Olympic gold medal.

   WRONG. When they beat South Sudan by only 17 points it was clear that this prediction was in trouble. A gold medal is nothing to be ashamed of, but they didn’t come close to winning every game in a blowout, nearly losing to Serbia in the semifinals, then barely pulling away from France to win by 11 in the finals. I’m not sure how a roster with Steph Curry, Lebron James, Kevin Garnet, and other stars didn’t turn the Olympics into the Globetrotters vs Washington Generals, but my prediction of a second-coming of the 1992 Dream Team (whose “closest” game was a 32 point win) didn’t come to pass.

6. Twitter will either be sold or spun off into a non-profit foundation.

   WRONG. I thought that Elon Musk might spin off Twitter X both to unload a bad investment and to free it from the perception of bias, but instead he has… gone in another direction. Meanwhile Bluesky is finally ramping up, and many of the engineers, academics and economists that I used to follow on Twitter are starting to post there.

7. 2024 will see the start of antitrust actions against Apple over its app store and iOS ecosystem in both the US and EU, but nothing will be close to changing by end of year.

   CORRECT. Hey, I got one! Both Europe and America have started antitrust proceedings against Apple, but it’s going to drag on for years. In the meantime, in an effort to stave off regulators Apple finally adopted text messaging standards that are compatible with other types of phones, so that’s a (small) win.

8. Deadpool 3 will become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.

   CORRECT. Second correct prediction! While it wasn’t Marvel’s best film (or honestly even the best of the Deadpool films), it now stands as the highest grossing R-rated film both domestically and internationally.

9. Marvin Harrison Jr and four quarterbacks will be the top five picks in the NFL draft.

   WRONG. During the draft I was thinking about this prediction as Caleb Williams (QB) was picked first, Jayden Daniels (QB) was picked second, Drake Maye (QB) was picked third, and Marvin Harrison was picked fourth. Then four picks went by until Michael Penix (QB) was picked eighth, and this prediction went down in flames.

10. Either Paramount Studios or Warner Brothers Studios (or both) will be sold to Netflix, Google, or another media company anxious to enhance their streaming offerings.

    WRONG. Paramount and Skydance are finalizing a merger, but I really thought one of the major streamers would look at Paramount as an ideal acquisition target.

11. Both the Tesla Cybertruck and the Apple Vision Pro headset will see disappointing sales and will have to either cut production targets or drop prices to attract buyers.

    CORRECT. Despite having a million reservations, Tesla is having trouble selling Cybertrucks after delivering less than 50,000, while Apple is rumored to have sold fewer than 100,000 Apple Vision Pro headsets. The technology in both products is actually really impressive, but Tesla needs to move away from their stainless-steel triangle and build a truck that actually appeals to truck owners, while $3,500 for a headset that (so far) is mostly only good for watching 3-D movies is a tough sell.

12. The Dow Jones Industrial Average will end the year up 15-25 percent.

    WRONG. The Dow was at 45,000 in early December, a gain of 19%, but then someone noticed that I had predicted a 15-25% rise for the year and pressed the smite button. The markets tanked, and while they ended the year up a very nice 12.9%, it fell short of the 15% I predicted.

13. AI generated content will lead to confusion and scandals during the 2024 election cycle.

    WRONG. It’s getting shockingly easy to generate realistic AI content, but surprisingly there wasn’t a lot of fake Trump or Kamala content going viral during this election cycle. I’m not sure if the social media companies were just really good at flagging it, or if everyone was so polarized that nothing meaningful broke through, but for whatever reason, the new technology didn’t seem to be used as nefariously as it could have been in this cycle.

14. Despite the doors literally falling off of 737-MAX planes, Boeing won’t face additional troubles in 2024 and will be on track for a very successful 2025.

    WRONG. Boeing has a new CEO, a new contract with its machinist union, and is working to change the investor-focused culture that began with its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas back to a safety and engineering-focused culture that existed pre-merger, but it looks like it’s still going to be a while before they have a “very successful” year. The new 777X has been delayed again (originally supposed to enter service in 2019, now 2026), they are laying off staff, and they have shelved plans for new planes until things are running normally, so it’s going to be several more years before one of America’s most celebrated companies is healthy again.

15. Both the Jeddah Tower and the Dubai Creek Tower will resume construction this year, portending new records in the “world’s tallest” category.

    HALF CREDIT. Both of these record-breaking construction projects are supposedly restarting construction, but while the Jeddah Tower site shows signs of activity, the Dubai Creek Tower announced it was restarting but doesn’t seem to be very active. I’m taking half credit since it looks like the Jeddah Tower is actually going to be built and become the world’s tallest building, while Dubai Creek Tower isn’t being worked on and its plans now seem to indicate that it will no longer aim to become the world’s tallest structure.

Final score: 3.5/15. Ouch. That’s only slightly worse than last year’s performance, so I’m definitely going to be keeping my day job. The 2025 predictions should be online by the end of the month, and I’m setting a goal of at least 30% correct for once, since I like to dream big.