His career advice has resonated well with his younger sister Tosca Musk, as well as, RPG Enterprises chairman Harsh Goenka. Recently, the Indian billionaire shared Musk's advice on Twitter which says, "Don’t attach yourself to a person, place, an organization or a project. Attach yourself to a mission, a calling, a purpose only. That’s how you keep your power and your peace".
Musk's sister Tosca who runs a streaming platform Passionflix has often appreciated her brother for 'golden' advice. In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, Tosca said once Elon told her, "You should pay attention to who is investing in your company because you will be married to them forever".
Last year, in "Lex Fridman Podcast", Elon Musk recommended that young people should never pick a career based on whether or not it could make them famous. Rather, he said, focus on something much simpler: Find a job that you’d be good at and matches the skillset you’ve built over time.
"[Don’t] try to be a leader for the sake of being a leader...A lot of times ... the people you want as leaders are the people who don’t want to be leaders," the billionaire said in an interview. According to the Tesla CEO, a desire to be in the spotlight won’t necessarily help.
Instead, to become that humble and empathetic leader, Musk advised that young people focus on the job immediately in front of them — and trust that overperforming in that role will help them rise up the career ladder
"Find something where there’s an overlap of your talents and what you are interested in," Musk said.
It must be noted that Elon Musk never set out to be a tech entrepreneur. After graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, he applied for and was rejected from a job at an internet software company in Silicon Valley.
In "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" biography, The SpaceX founder told author Ashlee Vance that he did not get the job because he didn’t have a computer science degree. The incident forced him into entrepreneurship--the only way to get a job in tech. Consequently, Musk and his brother, Kimbal Musk, sold their first web software company Zip2 to the now-defunct computer company Compaq in 1999 for roughly $300 million. Musk used that money to start X.com, which eventually became PayPal.
“It is very hard [to contribute] more than you consume. To try to have a positive net contribution to society, I think that’s the thing to aim for," Musk said in the 2021 podcast.
