I agree with his sentiment.
My thesis in 2011 was on fuel cell technology. It is either inefficient, or too complicated, expensive and dangerous.
Basically all you need to focus on is, hydrogen is the first element on the table of elements, it is extremely reactive and volatile. When you diffuse the properties by binding it, then it becomes inefficient. When you try to use it in a reactive form, it is a nightmare.
The fact this technology has now existed in a bubble for almost two decades without any progress, points in the direction the whole industry and research behind it is fraudulent.
There are some niche applications, maybe, but that's about it.
I disagree with his sentiment. Note that I in general have rather favorable views of Musk and his achievements in complex technical and business areas.
When one says that fuel cell technology is inefficient, I'd like to hear reasons for that. Efficiency could be talked about in comparison with other schemes, or in comparison with theoretical limits, or maybe even in comparison with laboratory state of the art or reasonable expected future engineering limits. When somebody just says it's inefficient, it sounds like an unsupported argument.
Same goes for complexity, cost or safety of fuel cell technology. Modern electric batteries, for example, are rather complex, in my opinion, devices, so to accuse fuel cells in complexity there should be presented arguments.
Regarding cost, I'd like to see the numbers. Both more regular batteries and fuel cells have many decades of applications, and we know that technology costs tend to lower with perfecting the processes, so where are the numbers? Also, in addition to numbers, I'd like to see the explanation of changes in the past and explanation of projection of changes in the future.
Next, regarding safety. Frankly, I was surprised when I saw hydrogen cars, on the grounds of safety, and then I learned which decisions were made to keep safety reasonably high. That means we can probably improve safety with some clever ideas.
I'd like to see a comprehensive comparison with all known pro and contra. Good investigation, which is aimed at finding the actual truth, so to speak, should involve all reasonable objections, so no proponent or critic of the technology may point to his arguments as missed in the analysis.
A similar analysis I feel is lacking in proposing nuclear power solutions - partial - to climate crisis. Too often somebody accuses governments in being too slow with deployments of nuclear power plant technology, but omits the concerns which critics of nuclear power point to. So sides keep talking past each other, accusing the other in irrationality.
Coming back to hydrogen - yes, I agree that hydrogen is reactive and volatile, but we still have more than half a century of working with it in industrial quantities. Yes, binding hydrogen with something reduces efficiency - but e.g. both CH4 and NH3 are used or were used as fuels in some applications, so it's not clear that NH3 couldn't be used again.
So, maybe - maybe - hydrogen technology loses today to electric batteries. Even discounting some unique advantages of hydrogen, like energy per unit of mass, it's not clear neither how much, nor if it could be improved in the future.
Musk's estimations look understandable, but not obviously true. We have many variants of both technologies we're comparing here. The mentions of "fool cells" - which, by the way, were used in Apollo flights to the Moon half a century ago - badly want justification, which we don't see much around us these days.
They take platinum, and we don't have enough. Sure there are a lot of platinum-free alternative's on the horizon, but they have been saying the same thing for decades. Until the day that we figure out how to make a catalyst out of nanotubes, I'm afraid fuel cells will never compete with batteries on a large scale.
They are useful in come niche situations though, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Helios_Prototype
Basically all you need to focus on is, hydrogen is the first element on the table of elements, it is extremely reactive and volatile. When you diffuse the properties by binding it, then it becomes inefficient. When you try to use it in a reactive form, it is a nightmare.
The fact this technology has now existed in a bubble for almost two decades without any progress, points in the direction the whole industry and research behind it is fraudulent.
There are some niche applications, maybe, but that's about it.