When he’s not pontificating about Mars missions, self-driving cars and free speech on Twitter, Elon Musk has some surprisingly practical career advice for young people.
In a December 2021 episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast, hosted by MIT computer scientist Lex Fridman, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX recommended that young people never choose a career based on whether it might make them famous or not. Instead, he said, focus on something much simpler: Find a job that you’d be good at and that matches the skills you’ve built over time.
“[Don’t] try to be a leader for the sake of being a leader,” said Musk, 51. “A lot of times… the people you want as leaders are the ones who don’t want to be leaders.”
The idea that power-hungry people don’t make effective leaders is backed up by scientific research: Last year, researchers from the Technical University of Munich found that “highly narcissistic leaders can disrupt teams independent of context.” Accordingly, a 2015 study published in the Journal of Management found that humble and empathetic leaders often improve team performance.
To become that humble and empathetic leader, Musk advised young people to focus on the job immediately in front of them — and believe that over-performing in that role will help them move up the career ladder. The desire to be in the spotlight won’t necessarily help, he added.
“Try to find something where there’s an overlap of your talents and what interests you,” Musk said.
Musk himself didn’t initially set out to become a tech entrepreneur: After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1997, he applied for and was turned down for a job at Netscape, an Internet software company in Silicon Valley, according to the 2015 biography “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future”.
In the book, Musk told author Ashlee Vance that he likely wouldn’t have gotten the job because he didn’t have a computer science degree, essentially forcing him into entrepreneurship as the only way to get a job in tech. He and his brother, Kimbal Musk, sold their first web software company, Zip2, to the now-defunct computer company Compaq in 1999 for about $300 million. Musk used that money to launch X.com, which eventually became PayPal.
Lately, Musk seems to have strayed from his own advice: the serial entrepreneur and tech billionaire has a history of launching companies and installing himself as CEO. He currently heads SpaceX and Tesla, and also plays a major role in other companies he founded, such as The Boring Company and Neuralink.
But Musk, who has a huge fan base and enjoys a healthy following on social media platforms like Twitter, does not publicly attribute his many leadership positions to a passion for the limelight. Rather, he told Friedman, his goal is to be useful, as young people should aim to be.
“I have a lot of respect for someone who does an honest job of doing useful things,” Musk said. “It is too hard [to contribute] more than you consume. To try to have a net positive contribution to society, I think this is the thing to aim for”.
Register now: Get smarter about your money and your career with our weekly newsletter
Don’t miss:
Elon Musk Tweets His Best Investing Tips — And It Sounds A Lot Like Warren Buffett’s Strategy
Mark Zuckerberg’s advice to young people: Focus more on building relationships than being ‘goal-focused’
