Elon Musk’s Tips for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a serial entrepreneur who keeps winning. Although controversial, his recent $44 billion purchase of Twitter showed the world just how far his billions go.

The forward-thinking mogul launched X.com, which merged with Confinity to become PayPal, but he’s better known for co-founding electric automaker Tesla and launching SpaceX — a rocket company he hopes will one day allow people to live on other planets.

Musk is also the chairman of the solar panel design company SolarCity and a co-founder of the nonprofit research company OpenAI. Innovative ideas combined with hard work have helped Musk build a colossal net worth of $262.3 billion, according to Forbes as of May 4.

If you’re looking to succeed in business, borrowing a few moves from Musk’s playbook would be smart. Here’s what he’s learned over the course of the last decade. Find out ways to think more like an entrepreneur.

Starting a business is a process of trial and error. Musk emphasized the value of asking for advice during a Google Hangout in August 2013 organized by Google for Entrepreneurs.

“Take as much feedback from as many people as you can about whatever idea you have,” Musk said. “Seek critical feedback. Ask them what’s wrong. You often have to draw it out in a nuanced way to figure out what’s wrong.”

Musk said in a Google Hangout in 2013 that constructive criticism from other people is very helpful. Sometimes critiques are hard to hear, but it’s all part of the learning process. If you want to succeed in business, learn not to take feedback personally.

This advice is useful even if you’re not trying to helm a startup. When you’re too close to a project, it’s often difficult to spot missteps, so input from others can prove invaluable.

Musk didn’t build Tesla by sitting in a corner office and watching employees work. During the Google Hangout, he explained that, as company leaders, co-founders and CEOs have to pitch in where necessary to keep the company afloat.

“You’ve got to do all sorts of jobs and tasks that you might not wish to do, that are not intrinsically interesting to you,” he said. “You’ve got to be prepared to do whatever it takes and work whatever hours. No task is too menial. I think that’s the right attitude for the CEO of a startup.”

Anything but glamorous, the job of the CEO can include anything from answering phones to cleaning the office kitchen when your company is just starting out. Be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get to work.

Although it’s important that new employees share your vision, team members can sometimes become misaligned. This is not ideal, but it’s not necessarily a deal-breaker or a reason to cut the person from your team.

Musk advises talking to a staff member and explaining the problem if they begin behaving in a way that is inconsistent with your company culture.In most cases, he said, the person will change their behavior, but if they don’t, you need to be prepared to let them go.

When hiring new employees, you have to make sure they mesh well with your team. In the Google Hangout, Musk emphasized the importance of teamwork and aligning expectations from the beginning.

“I think it’s important that everyone understands exactly what the mission is and what the goal is, and that when they join the company, they’re bought into that overall goal,” Musk said. “As long as that goal is clearly defined and understood and people are saying ‘yes,’ they agree with that goal when they join the company — so, they are not just joining for a salary or something like that, but they believe in what the company is doing.”

Job seekers looking for work at Tesla, SpaceX, or any of Musk’s companies are put through the ringer.  Not likely to be fooled by an expert interviewee, Musk believes tough interview questions show a candidate’s true fit for the position.

At the February 2017 World Government Summit in Dubai, Elon Musk talked about the one interview question he believes reveals the most about a candidate’s aptitude, though it’s quite a multifaceted request.

“Tell me the story of your life and the decisions that you made along the way and why you made them.” And also tell me about some of the things you worked on and how you solved them,” Musk said.  “People that really solved the problem, they know exactly how they solved it—they know the little details.”

Musk emphasized the importance of the question, noting that candidates trying to fake their way into the job can only elaborate to an extent until they’re caught in the lie. Therefore, if you want to hire the best person for the job, you have to dig deep.

When Musk was named to the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world in 2013, Richard Branson wrote a profile on him for the magazine, praising his ability to prove critics wrong.

“Whatever skeptics have said can’t be done, Elon has gone out and made real,” Branson wrote. Powered by innovation, the Tesla CEO continues to create — even when skeptics believe his ideas won’t make it off the ground.

For many entrepreneurs, such as the late Steve Jobs, the mark of success is their ability not only to inspire but also to have a clear vision.

Whether he’s defending the price of Tesla stock or the need to colonize Mars, Musk doesn’t flinch. “It’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it,” Branson wrote. “But true vision is binocular, and Elon Musk is clearly a man who can see many things at once.”

“I don’t believe in process,” Musk said in a 2012 Wired interview. “In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that ‘it’s all about the process,’ I see that as a bad sign.”

Though shocking if said by most other CEOs, it’s probably not too surprising that a man focused on innovation likes to switch things up. In fact, his reasoning will probably make you want to throw the process out the window.

“The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking,” he said. “You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart or who aren’t that creative.”

Already a successful entrepreneur in 2008, Musk explained to PBS at the time that he didn’t co-found Tesla to earn money. Instead, he recognized the environmental need to change the way vehicles are powered, so he created an electric automobile company.

“So this is not about wealth accumulation for me personally,” he said. “It’s just that I think this is a very important problem, and it’s got to get solved, and if we don’t solve it, we’re in trouble.”

Whether you’re starting a company or accepting a certain job, if you’re not passionate about it, you won’t succeed. Musk was already a wealthy man at the time of the PBS interview, which perhaps allowed him to become an electric automaker for all the right reasons.

“If I got a bunch of money tomorrow, it wouldn’t change my life,” he said. “There’s nothing; I’ve bought everything I want.”

Although it might take a while for your business to achieve success, it’s better to start building it as early as you can, according to Musk. During your youth, you’re empowered to take risks and focus your energy on growing your business without the yoke of so many life responsibilities. But that all changes the further along in life you are.

“As you get older, your obligations increase,” Musk said in an interview with Forbes. “So I would encourage you to take risks now, to do something daring; you will not be sorry.”

It’s no secret that starting a business is difficult, but not everyone truly understands the amount of hard work and self-perseverance it takes to get a business off the ground. In reality, the life of an entrepreneur is not for everyone, as Musk said as part of his business advice.

“I think it’s very difficult to start companies; it’s quite painful,” Musk told students from Draper University who came to visit his Tesla factory. “A friend of mine has a good phrase for doing a startup: It’s like eating glass and staring into the abyss. If you are wired to do it, then only do it; otherwise, do not. So think of it this way: “If you need inspiring words, don’t do it.”

Although it might seem glamorous to run your own business, Musk says you must be careful not to get caught up in the romanticized version of the life of an entrepreneur. Thanks to shows like “Silicon Valley,” which follows the journey of a man building a startup, and media displays of successful entrepreneurs, the hard life of the “working” entrepreneur is often downplayed. In reality, half of all businesses don’t exist after their first five years, according to the 2015-16 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report.

“First of all, being an entrepreneur has been glamorized too much in movies and TV shows, but most of the time, running a business is hard,” Musk told the students at Draper University.”Most of us aren’t ready for it or are more interested in the idea of being an entrepreneur than in putting in the effort to become one.”

The consumer space is already flooded with so many businesses that consumers, most likely, already have their go-to brands that they rely on for services. So, in order to encroach on that space and get people to venture out to your fledgling business, your business needs to stand out, Musk says.

“If you’re entering anything where there’s an existing marketplace against large, entrenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs,” Musk said, according to Inc. “It can’t be a little bit better, because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer, and you’re always going to buy the trusted brand unless there’s a big difference.”