I am wired for war.48
Q: Why doesn’t the world have more Elon Musks?
If you think you want to be me or do the things I've done…I would say you’re probably mistaken. Long periods of my life have been very painful and difficult. I’m not sure people would want to go through that.49
The amount I torture myself is next level.50 You need to have some kind of rage demon in your skull that drives you.51
Q: Are you always working?
How many days a year do I not put in some meaningful amount of work? Maybe two or three.52
You must be extremely tenacious. Work like hell. You have to put in eighty- to one-hundred-hour weeks every week. This will improve your odds of success.53
You need to work. Work hard. Like every waking hour. Particularly if you’re starting a company, you need to work super hard. Do the simple math: Somebody else is working fifty hours a week and you’re working one hundred. You’ll get twice as much done in a year.54 If other people are putting in forty-hour workweeks and you’re putting in one hundred, what takes them a year, you will achieve in four months.55
You’re not going to create revolutionary cars or rockets in forty hours a week. It just won’t work. Colonizing Mars isn’t going to happen on forty hours a week.56
Nobody ever changed the world on forty hours a week.57
I’ve done these things because I felt a strong compulsion to do them.58 I’ve been burning the candle at both ends with a flamethrower for a very long time.
From 2007 until 2022 was nonstop pain. There was a gun to my head to make Tesla work. Pull a rabbit out of your hat, then pull another rabbit. A stream of rabbits flying through the air. If the next rabbit does not come out, you’re dead. It took a toll.
You can’t be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not have it hurt you. Fighting to survive keeps you going for quite a while.59
With that said, I would say this to twenty-something me: I think there’s some merit to not being too intense, and enjoying the moment a bit. Occasionally stopping to smell the roses would probably be a good idea.60
When we were developing the Falcon One rocket on the Kwajalein Atoll, this beautiful little island in the middle of the Pacific, not once during that entire time did I pause and have a drink on the beach. Now, I realize I should have had a drink with the team on the beach…that would have been fine.61
If heat death will inevitably end the universe, it actually is all about the journey.62