Pushing the Limits: Elon Musk’s Drive to Expand Humanity’s Future
At the World Government Summit Elon was asked “You always seem to be pushing the human limit. You are always pushing the human limit. Why?”
Elon replied: “I think about what technology solution is required to achieve a particular goal. And then try to make as much progress as possible in that direction as possible…
Being a multi-planet species and being out there among the stars is important for the long term survival of humanity.
That’s one reason. Kind of like a life insurance policy for life collectively, life as we know it…
The part that I find personally the most motivating is that it creates a sense of adventure. And it makes people excited about the future…
And if you consider two futures:
One where we are forever confined to Earth until eventually something terrible happens.
Or another future where we are out there on many planets maybe going beyond the solar system. I think that second version is incredibly exciting and inspiring.
And there needs to be a reason to get up in the morning. Life can’t just be about solving problems. Otherwise, what’s the point?
There’s got to be things that people find inspiring and make life worth living.”
Elon is accelerating the rate at which humanity is exploring space and that is nothing short of amazing.
Elon Musk on Profit: It’s Proof You’re Adding Real Value
In his Kahn academy interview with Sal Kahn Elon said:
“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with profit, in fact profit just means that people are paying you more for whatever you are doing than you are spending to create it…
And that’s a good thing. If that’s not the case then you would be out of business and rightfully so because you’re not adding enough value.”
So add more value. Stack on bonuses. Strengthen your offer by finding ways to improve your product.
Elon explains by investing in his own companies it becomes easier to ask others to do the same.
In a Milken Institute Interview Elon was asked: “You put a lot of your eggs in one basket. Would you advise entrepreneurs to roll the bones quite the way you did?”
Elon: “Yeah absolutely! I think it’s worth investing your own capital in what you do. I don’t believe in the sort of other people’s money thing…
I think if you’re not willing to put your own assets at stake then you shouldn’t ask other people to do that.”
Elon is all in with having skin in the game.
By investing more of his own money into growing his businesses Elon has more invested, and more reasons to stay focused on fully optimizing the businesses he is invested in.
When you are willing to invest everything into your businesses you have every reason to make it work.
Find a noble reason beyond profit to make your business work – and this will likely boost your profitability.
SpaceX is currently the most profitable rocket company but at one point they had never sent a rocket to orbit and were running deep in the red.
But they pulled through and made it to orbit with the fourth launch!
So why take the risk? Elon explains his bigger than money motive:
“Now is the first time in the history of Earth the windows has opened where it is possible for us to extend life to another planet…the wise move is to make life multiplanetary while we can.” (AGU)
It’s not about the odds of success as much as it is about the importance of the mission: “If something is important enough, then you should do it anyway.”
Having a super human mission is the superhuman effort realized to help achieve it.
Elon Musk’s Mastery of the Pivot: Building Empires Through Adaptation
There are plenty of potholes on the roads of business as you climb the winding mountain of success.
Innovating, iterating, and focusing on what is working best seems to be the best way to climb.
With PayPal: “Initially the thought with PayPal was to create a conglomeration of financial services. So that you have one place where all of your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and work smoothly…
And then we had a little feature which is email payments.
And whenever we’d show the system off to someone. We’d show the hard part, which was the conglomeration of financial services. Which was quite difficult to put together. And nobody was interested…
Then we’d show email payments, which was actually quite easy, and everybody was interested.
So I think it’s important to take feedback from your environment. You know because you want to be as closed loop as possible.
So we focused on email payments and really trying to make that work. And that’s what really got things to take off.
But if we had not responded to what people said then we probably would not have been successful.
So it’s important to look for things like that and focus on them when you see them, and correct your prior assumptions.”
Adaptability is key.
Modifying the names of brands is one powerful way to adapt for the better as a business.
Elon has adapted the name of the school he created for his children from Ad Astra to Astra Nova for example. And now the name of the school is Synthesis.
Elon’s company Neuralink was originally called Neuralace.
The mission of Tesla was recently changed with a post on X from “Sustainable Abundance” to “Amazing Abundance.”
Constant adaptation and innovation is why Tesla vehicles do not have model years. This way Tesla can roll out new features rapidly, and consistently, rather than waiting for the next model year to implement improvements.
Elon’s companies are always adapting. Always innovating.
And it’s paying off. With each innovation Tesla increases their technology superiority in the auto industry.
How Elon Musk Masters the Art of Getting People Excited
Getting plenty of people excited about what you are working for is powerful for producing organic marketing opportunities.
Elon is a master of influencing public opinion.
At STVP Future Fest he explained:
“If you’re trying to convince the public to do something, then you have to think “OK, what’s the message?
What’s going to get them really excited?”
Part of this strategy is obvious in the exciting events SpaceX, Tesla and Elon put on with every rocket or product launch.
Elons brother Kimbal manages a company called Nova sky stories which puts on drone shows for many events. Tesla events and many others are put on by Nova Sky Stories and I look forward to seeing one of them for myself in real life.
Here’s a screen caption of the Tesla logo in the sky.
Excitement Built in the Products:
And anyone who has driven a Tesla can attest to the exciting feeling of instant acceleration when you drive it.
Elon’s companies have a feeling of the future about them. It is fun to be a part of it.
With Tesla’s the horn can be customized as well. You could turn it into a whoopie cushion if you wanted.
The cars can “dance” with their lights if you want them to.
And anyone who has driven a Tesla can attest to the exciting feeling of instant acceleration when you drive it.
Tesla Plaid’s are the fastest 0-60 production cars on Earth so this effect really hypes some people up.
It is called “The Tesla Effect” and gets people excited without fail.
With SpaceX anyone near Starbase can watch a rocket launch if they want to. It’s located right near a major highway and they launch multiple times per week usually.
Elon says it seems like we are at the beginning of the big bang of intelligence. It will be interesting to see where the advances in the coming years will take us.
Starship’s first mission to Mars is scheduled for 2026.
With awe-inspiring ideas which are launching us into the future, Elon has benefited from first mover advantage in all his business ventures.
Elon even generated a massive amount of press for himself with his highly imaginative idea the Hyperloop.
The Hyperloop is Musk’s proposal for a faster new form of transportation between the Greater Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area.
The system is proposed to use a partial vacuum to reduce aerodynamic drag, which it is theorized would allow for high speed travel with relatively low power.
SpaceX announced an open competition, geared towards university students and independent engineering teams, to design and build the best Hyperloop pod.
Then SpaceX built a testing Hyperloop rig and encouraged groups of teams from around the world to compete in 2017 and 2018.
The event was a great success.
As of 2025 the website on SpaceX no longer shows these images as they are more relevant to Elon’s business The Boring Company.
Grok Imagination is Amazing Image Visualization
However another way an Elon managed company can give your imagination a boost is Grok: Specifically, Grok Imagine.
With Grok Imagine you can visualize almost anything you can think of. Many images on Elonology.com and in the book are Grok images as well. A watermark in the bottom right corner can help you tell.
The images are very life like. Undoubtedly with progress in this area indistinguishability between Grok Imagine and real life will occur.
This is what Grok’s Imagine home page looks like currently. Every image you see is actually a short video.
Try Grok Imagine for yourself and get a better look!
Only by striving for perfection can you hope to come close to achieving it.
Elon is constantly striving for perfection with his companies.
At STCP Future Fest he said:
“Aspirationally, we’re in pursuit of the platonic ideal of the perfect car. Who knows what that looks like actually, but you want to try to make every element of the car as flawless as possible…
There will always be some degree of imperfection, but we try to minimize that and create a car that is just delightful in every way.”
Perfection might be an impossible ideal but by striving for it you can get closer to achieving the idea.
“As long as people stay super focused on creating the absolutely best product or service that really delights their end customer…
Stay focused on that (because) basically if you get it such that your customers want you to succeed then you probably will…
If your customers love you your odds of success are dramatically higher.”
At InvestHK Elon said: “Really focus on a product your customers love. It’s so rare that you can buy a product and you love the product when you bought it. There are very few things that fit into that category…
If you can come up with something like that your business will be successful for sure.”
Tesla produces cars that save plenty of lives and produce plenty of happiness. So it’s no surprise they have plenty of sales as an outcome of their efforts. Sales that continue to rise.
And now SpaceX is delighting not only astronauts and the SpaceX team…they are also delighting civilian crews (led by ultra-wealthy benefactors for now) on trips around the earth.
Jared Isaacman and his crew of 4 recently splashed down in the ocean after three days in orbit around earth. And setting a record for the first time three Dragon capsules have been in orbit simultaneously.
Soon SpaceX will be doing a civilian lunar tourism trip around the moon called “dearMoon” with Japanese benefactor Yusaku Maezawa.
The dearMoon mission will take place on a larger spaceship (Starship) and will take Maezawa, 8 civilians, and one or two crew members around the dark side of the moon.
An artist did this rendering of a floating violinist playing for the dearMoon audience in space. Undoubtedly the show will be a delight.
Whether it’s Tesla vehicles, SpaceX rockets, The Boring Company flamethrowers or any other awesome company he’s involved with you can be sure as long as Elon is calling the shots the fantastic products his engineering teams bring to light will continue to delight.
Elon took on the auto industry and the aerospace industry…and won!
So he knows what it takes to be the little guy and do what it takes to innovate, grow and win against some of the biggest companies in the world.
Make no mistake when you are the little guy with big competitors they will try and stamp you out.
And since the big competitors benefit from economies of scale you rarely can compete against them on price…
So to win you need to create a superior product.
As Elon puts it: “If you’re a new company entering an existing marketplace where there are large entrenched competitors then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs…
It can’t be a little bit better. Because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer and they say why would you buy it as a consumer. You’re always going to buy the trusted brand unless there is a big difference.
So a lot of times an entrepreneur will come up with something which is only slightly better. And it can’t just be slightly better, it’s got to be a lot better.”
With that attitude in mind they built the original Tesla roadster.
The same commitment to quality remains in the design of new products, like new Tesla Roadster.
Think about what kind of product you would love to have and put as much passion as possible into the product you create.
You have to love your product in order for other people to love it too.
On a call with investment bankers in 2018 Elon refused several bone headed comments and told day traders or investors afraid of volatility straight up not to buy Tesla stock because:
“I am not here to convince you to buy our stock…I could care less.”
What Elon does care about is innovation. He shared some powerful insights about innovation on the on the call:
“What matters is the pace of innovation. It is a fundamental determinant to competitiveness…
Let’s say competitors, maybe they come out with something new every six years. We’re maybe every two to three years.
So if our innovation is let’s say twice that of any given competitor…
And this is true generally of companies in any industry…
Whichever company has the highest rate of innovation, unless that company is actively killed by it’s competitors in some way that’s nefarious, or shoots itself in the foot, it will at some point exceed those competitors…
Like this is obvious that this would occur with Amazon and Wal-Mart because wal-mart’s rate of innovation was negligible. And Amazon’s was very high. The outcome was obvious a long time ago.”
In a more recent interview about the AxelSpringer Award (Which Elon ended up winning) Elon echoed similar sentiments saying:
“The company with the higher rate of innovation will unequivocally win long term.”
The lesson here is clear: Innovation matters most.
Moreover the more aggressively you innovate and iterate the faster you will dominate.
“Innovation per year is what matters. Not innovation absent time. Because if you want to make say 100% improvement in something and that took 100 years, or one year, that’s radically different…
So it’s like “what is your rate of innovation?” that matters and “is the rate of innovation accelerating or decelerating?”
At InvestHK Elon said: Innovation comes from questioning the way things have been done before…
And if in the education system you’re taught not to do that that will inhibit entrepreneurship.
Interviewer: “Being able to question what you were taught?”
Elon: “Being able to say: ‘Is there a better way?”
Elon has innovated with Tesla to the point where multiple sources who confirm Tesla has created some of the best cars ever.
That’s the game changing level of innovation you need to have a position in the marketplace where you are in a category of your own.
Here are some of Elon’s quotes on innovation:
“Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive, and determination of the people behind it as the product they sell.”
“Great companies are built on great products.”
“Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic.”
Although Elon does not strive for failure, he certainly does not hide from it either. And that is why he was able to push on and succeed with SpaceX after their first three rockets failed and he was down to his last dime.
Facing failure head on and learning from it is a lesson I learned the hard way. Once I got a speeding ticket and rather than setting the court date in my calendar I shoved the ticket in a folder and forgot about it. Since I missed the court date I got the maximum fine in my absence.
Had I faced that situation head on maybe I would have emerged successful. At least I would have gotten a lesser fine, or perhaps the cop would not have shown up for the court date and my ticket would have been dropped.
These days no matter how difficult the issue I might be facing I deal with it as soon as possible so it does not become ignored or forgotten about, causing the punishment of ignorance over time.
Action is the antidote to despair.
As Elon says:
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
“If every time somebody came up with an idea it had to be successful you don’t get people coming up with examples.”
Failure is not to be feared. In fact just the opposite: It should be encouraged!
Because with more experiments, which will cause more failures, you will ultimately end up with more successes and a faster pace of innovation.
Elon has said several times: “The public tends to respond to precedents and superlatives.”
So let’s start by defining those words so we’re clear on them…
Precedent Google definition:An event or action that is regarded as an example or guide to be considered in subsequent similar circumstances.
Example: “There are substantial precedents for using interactive media in training”
Superlative Google definition: Of the highest quality or degree.
Alright now that we’ve got those definitions let’s get into why Elon says precedents and superlatives are so important.
Elon discusses how the initial mission of SpaceX was:
To do a low cost mission to Mars called “Mars Oasis” where you would land seeds with dehydrated nutrient gel [on Mars], and then you hydrate them upon landing, and then you’d sort of have this great money shot of green plants on a red background…
And the public tends to respond to precedents and superlatives.
And this would be the first life on Mars and the farthest that life’s ever travelled as far as we know, and I thought well that would get people really excited. And therefore increase NASA’s budget.
So obviously the financial benefit of such a mission would probably be zero so anything better than that was on the upside.
This story Elon shares because it emphasises the importance of precedents and superlatives.
Elon was willing to finance the entire mission simply so he could move the goal of greater space exploration forward with the power of precedents and superlatives. Elon has been able to market his businesses efficiently by using the natural marketing power of word of mouth marketing, fueled by the remarkability of precedents and superlatives.
