Words of Wisdom from Elon Musk

by Scott Edward Walker on January 24th, 2016

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we share a favorite video clip of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we again present Elon Musk, a brilliant entrepreneur and CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors, chairman of SolarCity, and co-chairman of OpenAI.

In this interesting 2014 commencement address (which starts at the 1:16 mark), Elon shares some solid advice for entrepreneurs, including the following:

• “You need to work super-hard… If somebody else is working 50 hours [per week] and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of a year as the other company.” (at 1:49)
• “Attract great people… all a company is is a group of people that has gathered together to create a product or service.” (at 2:57)
• “Focus on signal over noise… keep thinking about ‘are these efforts that people are expending resulting in a better product or service?’” (at 3:32)
• “Don’t just follow the trend.” (at 4:21)

I hope you enjoy it.  Cheers, Scott