Elon Musk knows a thing or two about starting companies—but his advice for would-be entrepreneurs might not exactly inspire them.
“If you need encouragement to start a company, don’t do it,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO warned during a Spaces conversation with ARK Investment Management CEO Cathie Wood on Thursday. “The probability of failure is very high, so you really should not if you need encouragement.”
Musk, of course, has needed little encouragement to turn his companies into juggernauts. In 2008, Wired asked Musk how he kept his optimism in the face of one rocket failure after another at SpaceX, and the billionaire’s response hinted at a level of determination that perhaps obviates the need for much encouragement.
“Optimism, pessimism, f–k that,” he replied. “We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.”
Today, of course, the company dominates the launch market, to the point where space-industry insiders worry it’s become too dominant.
In addition to leading SpaceX, Musk is also CEO of the electric-vehicle maker Tesla, and he owns the tunnel drilling business the Boring Company, the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), the neurotechnology venture Neuralink, and the artificial-intelligence startup xAI, which is taking on OpenAI with its own AI chatbot Grok.
Not everyone will accomplish so much, of course, but Musk downplayed his achievements somewhat. “I just have a lot of respect for anyone who works hard and, you know, builds things,” he said yesterday.
Musk ‘can’t turn it off’
He isn’t the only high-profile founder to warn about the difficulty of launching a company of late. A few months ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, 60, also offered frank advice on launching a startup. Asked on the Acquired podcast what sort of company he’d think about starting if he were 30 years old, Huang replied: “I wouldn’t do it.”
“Building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be—than any of us expected it to be,” he added. “If we realized the pain and suffering [involved] and just how vulnerable you’re going to feel, the challenges that you’re going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, and the list of all the things that go wrong—I don’t think anybody would start a company. Nobody in their right mind would do it.”
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen described Musk a few months ago as the “paramount example” of an entrepreneur who “can’t turn it off.”
He also noted that simply having the traits of a serial entrepreneur doesn’t mean a person will become one: “There is this decision that people have to make, which is, ‘Okay, if I have the latent capability to do this, is this actually what I want to spend my life doing? And do I want to go through the stress and the pain and the trauma and the anxiety and the risk of failure?’”
Musk, he said, is that rare individual “who just can’t do it any other way. They just have to.”
For similarly wired entrepreneurs who are just getting started, Musk did share some practical advice. “Try to be useful,” he said. “Create products and services that people want, and make their lives better. That’s it.”
