Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla and SpaceX · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveinvestorengineer@elonmusk ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
He directs operations across aerospace manufacturer SpaceX, electric vehicle and clean energy company Tesla, and artificial intelligence venture xAI. Widely recognized as one of the world's wealthiest entrepreneurs, Musk also co-founded Neuralink and OpenAI, founded The Boring Company, and acquired social media platform X.
2statements → 0claims → 0claims resolved → 3/5average certainty → 4/5average debate potential → 722said about them ↓
2 opinions · every statement was checked. none of them is a claim the record can settle: opinions, insights and disclosures never carry an assessment.
Everything Elon Musk said on My First Million that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Musk: Controlling silicon intelligence a million times smarter than biology is foolish
“I'm just trying to be realistic here. If we have, if AI intelligence is vastly more, if AI is like, You know, let's say that there's a million times more silicon intelligence than there is biological. It's, I think it's, it would be foolish to assume that, tha…”
Musk: Aging is a solvable problem governed by a synchronizing biological clock
“I do think it is a very solvable problem. When we figure out what causes aging, I think we'll find it's incredibly obvious. It's not a subtle thing. The reason I say it's not a subtle thing is because all the cells in your body pretty much age at the same rate…”
The other half of the tape: Elon Musk's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 675 times in 144 episodes on My First Million. 47 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Shaan Puri 478Sam Parr 103Jon McNeill 17Cody Ko 12James Currier 8Anthony Pompliano 6Sasha Issenberg 5Nick Bilton 5
Statements about Elon Musk, by other people (47)
Puri: Musk attempted a $500M emergency bid to block Google buying DeepMind
“Elon then went to the PayPal co-founder, this guy, Luke Nosek, and tried to quickly like emergency raise, five hundred million dollars to buy DeepMind instead of Google, just to keep it out of the hands of Google. And he fails, he can't pull the deal together …”
Sean Puri: OpenAI would not exist without Elon Musk's early AI concerns
“It's clear that opening. I wouldn't have even would not have existed. It would not have been successful had he not genuinely had this fear and concern and belief about what needs to happen with AI long time ago.”
Puri: Twitter's Growth Is Capped Because It Only Serves Power Users
“That's the core problem with Twitter is that the core needed addresses is only for like people like us. And like, it doesn't address the need for a whole bunch of other people on the planet. And if they wanted it to be more valuable, then they would need to do…”
Puri: Struggling founders must project confidence to prevent fatal panic
“He's like, you know, it is in the incentive of somebody, of the captain of that ship, To go down with the ship and the whole time be saying, oh, we're so close to our destination. Basically. He was like, they're never going to come out and say, yeah, we don't …”
Sam Parr: Extreme work hours give early advantages but aren't needed forever
“If you are going to build like these outlandish things, like an Elon Musk type of thing, It does give you a competitive advantage to work really, really, really hard. And regardless if you start anything, you got to work really hard. But I don't think that you…”
Wilkinson: Building wealth does not require tech innovation or mimicking Elon Musk
“You don't need to do something innovative and crazy, right? You don't need to be the next Elon Musk or start some crazy technology. You can just choose a traditional business that's very poorly run and run it better. And I, you know, even better if it's a busi…”
Edtech startup Synthesis hit millions in revenue in six months organically
“They have, like, super high retention, amazing revenue already in six months you know, doing multiple millions of dollars a year in revenue with zero dollars in paid marketing, and what seems like the perfect team, it's the guy who created the school at Elon's…”
Musk instituted a strict three-sentence email rule for problem-solving at Tesla
“We actually had this a bit of a game for a while. I think it was just his idea. He's like, let's try to get down to three sentence emails. What is the problem? What's your analysis of the root cause and what's your proposed solution? And he's like, I think we …”
Musk slept at the factory while Tesla struggled with Model X doors
“When I started at Tesla, we were having a super big problem producing Model Xs and getting the Falcon wing doors to fit. And Elon and I had shared this favorite book, The Goal, which is all about manufacturing process. And he grabbed me one day. He said, okay,…”
Puri: Founders must balance long-term mission patience with short-term task urgency
“Yeah, I think it's sort of a, like long-term patience, as in you're not gonna give up, and you're gonna stay at it. I think short-term maniacal sense of urgency is, you know, on the task. So it's like patient with the mission and maniacal about the task is, is…”
Horowitz: Musk's Tesla Success Unlocked Hard Tech Venture Financing
“Whereas like only Elon could have financed Tesla, normal people can start to finance these things now because Elon has shown that it's possible. So it's a little bit like the four minute mile on that way, I would say.”
Senra: Elon Musk personally interviewed SpaceX's first 3,000 employees
“Early days of SpaceX. He personally, Elon personally interviewed the first 3000 employees of SpaceX.”
Puri: Musk funded over $40M into OpenAI and owns zero equity
“He funded the first 40 something million dollars into opening eye when it was a nonprofit and he owns nothing of the for profit today.”
Smart people's biggest mistake is optimizing things that shouldn't exist
“The biggest mistake that smart people make is optimizing something that shouldn't have existed in the first place.”
Founders Should Only Emulate Elon Musk 15% of the Time
“The trick with Elon Musk is you only want to be Elon Musk, like, 15% of the time in your company, right? When you're establishing the vision of, like, thinking big about what you're doing. He's amazing. You want to channel your inner Elon when you are You know…”
Puri: Six viral tweets drove most of my first 400K followers
“I basically had like six viral tweets that grew me to like almost 400,000 followers. It was literally just six tweets, basically. The bulk of the growth. It's like the clubhouse one, the metaverse one, this one about Elon Musk, this other one.”
Mark Zuckerberg is genuinely willing to fight Elon Musk at any weight
“I believe Zuck would be down. Catch weight, whatever. It doesn't matter. Like, I think Zuck is down. Zuck is a, is, is, is truly, you know, training, and regardless of this fight or not, he's in there.”
Puri: Investors judge multi-company CEOs purely through outcome-based resulting bias
“It's like Elon can run Tesla and SpaceX and everyone's like, wow, he's amazing. And those businesses are amazing. And then Jack does the same thing with Twitter and square. And if Twitter's misses its earnings, it's like off with his head. How dare he, you kno…”
Musk tests candidates by deeply interrogating problems he already understands
“So, his hiring method is he wants to determine whether or not you can do world-class work, and his method is to interrogate a particular problem and go super deep on it. And it's, Better if he tries to skew it to a problem that he knows.”
Puri: Elon Musk personally interviewed the first 1,000 SpaceX employees
“Because he hired, I guess, the first thousand people at SpaceX or thousand plus people at SpaceX. He interviewed them himself.”
Puri: Elon Musk became DeepMind's second significant backer
“The second backer, I think, the second significant backer was Elon Musk. So Thiel tells Elon about this. Elon meets Demis. Demis says that, that big dog line of basically like, I'm working on the most important thing in the world. Elon, you know, is like, wait…”
Elon Musk recruited Tim Urban directly for deep dives on his companies
“Elon basically says, I would love for you to write. I, he's like a bunch of people want to interview me. You know, they want me on 60 minutes. They want me on this. They want me on that. But I actually want you to write about what we're doing with AI, with Neu…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2026 76 mentions in 6 episodes 13 per episode
- Ex-Tesla President reveals EVERYTHING Elon does to win
- The Simplest Way To Make $1,000,000 Isn't Starting A Business (it's working in one of these 10)
- The Most Important Founder You've Never Heard Of
- 7 things Bezos, MrBeast & Thiel do that you don’t
- 4 dumb ideas that made people rich
- $100M+ Advice That'll Piss Off Every Business Guru (ft. DHH)
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 155 mentions in 31 episodes 5 per episode
- What’s truly going on inside DOGE?
- From making $6/week selling worms to making $110M+
- Business as a sport, Surge AI, and Waymo vs. Robotaxi
- 7 Wild Business Ideas for this $3 Trillion Dollar Frontier
- We spent 48 hours with MrBeast + 11 Billionaires
- 60 Minute Business Masterclass (worth more than your Stanford MBA)
- This guy made Millions by inventing the $1 Menu
- We talk to the guy who knows Silicon Valley’s darkest secrets
- 23 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 191 mentions in 38 episodes 5 per episode
- Elon Musk SUES Sam Altman
- Brainstorming +$1M Weird Business Ideas With Morning Brew’s CEO Austin Rief (#543)
- He Sold His Company For $15M, Then Got A Job At McDonald’s
- We Bet This App Idea Could Be Bigger Than Reddit
- 3 Things You Need To Outperform 99% Of Entrepreneurs
- Building A 100+ Year Legacy + Peter Thiel’s Fellowship + Bomb Hiring Questions
- Inside The Marketing Machine Of Billion-Dollar Presidential Campaigns
- From PayPal Intern to Starting 4x Billion-Dollar Companies | Joe Lonsdale Interview
- 30 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 76 mentions in 16 episodes 5 per episode
- Cody Ko On Building A YouTube Empire, Partying With Elon & Stand-Up Comedy (#503)
- This $3B Founder Is The Next Elon Musk (#499)
- Brainstorming ChatGPT Business Ideas With A Billionaire | ft. Dharmesh Shah (#438)
- Finding +$1M Businesses From Weird Trends (#523)
- Jesse Itzler's Exact Playbook For Creating HIT AFTER HIT (#504)
- Martin Shkreli Reveals How He Made His First $100 Million (#445)
- If I Had To Make $1 Billion... Here’s The Business I Would Start
- CEO Lessons: Bulls**t Mission Statements, Firing People & Saying ‘NO' (#505)
- 8 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 72 mentions in 18 episodes 4 per episode
- 8 Profitable Side Hustles For The Halloween & Christmas Season (#381)
- The 2022 Milly Awards (#401)
- Is The Rock Going to Make $1B+ From Tequila? + Placebo Water, STR Update, and More
- How To Get Started With Building An Audience in 2022 (#373)
- 5 Business Ideas With High Demand & Low Supply | Start These In 2022 (#374)
- The Easiest Way To Make $10,000/Month In Passive Income
- 3 Profitable Business Ideas You Should Start in 2022
- How I Sold My Company To PayPal For $800 Million | Bryan Johnson (#388)
- 10 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2021 102 mentions in 34 episodes 3 per episode
- How To Get the Most Out of Every Event and the World Premier of Southern Sam’s Sticky Icky
- This Year's Best Twitter Accounts to Follow
- How to Have an Early Adopter Mindset, ConstitutionDAO, Optimizing Twitter Bios, and More
- Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, "How Much is Pomp Worth?", and More
- Dopamine Fasts, Cruise Ship Investing, and Elon vs Bezos with Andrew Wilkinson, Co-Founder of Tiny
- Brainstorming Million Dollar Ideas with Elaine Zelby | My First Million Ep. #175
- The Milly Awards 2021
- Why Dunder Mifflin Should Be a Real Company & A Look Inside MicroAcquire | My First Million #203
- 26 more episodes that year, every mention in 2021 →
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Elon’s wildest interview yet — our reaction | Feb 18, 2026 | 25s |
Played on the show (1)
Episodes where a recording of Elon Musk was played rather than Elon taking part, or where the tape carries an address with nobody putting questions to them. Listed because the words are on the record, kept out of every score on this page because they were not said on this show. We read this off the tape: who was spoken to, who was asked something, who answered whom.
| Episode | Date | On tape | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25% Of My Portfolio Is Tesla Stock, Here's Why | Apr 22, 2026 | 19s | clip played |