Quote of the day: Elon Musk's words of wisdom on success — ‘The path to CEO’s office should not be through….’

Tesla's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Elon Musk, who is the world's richest person with an estimated net worth exceeding $800 billion, once emphasized that the route to becoming a CEO should focus on engineering and design rather than finance or marketing.

Quote of the day: Elon Musk's words of wisdom on success — “The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.”

What does this quote mean?

According to Space X founder, aspiring CEOs should prioritize engineering and design instead of taking the path through finance or marketing departments. Giving a vision to ambitious individuals to accomplish feats considered impossible, the richest person on Forbes' 2026 Billionaires list asserted the importance of engineering and design in running a business.

Born in Pretoria, South Africa

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971, Elon Musk has been the wealthiest person in the world since 2025. His entrepreneurial journey can be traced back to 1984 when he sold his first computer game at age of 12. His family emigrated to Canada in 1989. After securing bachelor's degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, he moved to California to pursue business ventures. He founded the software company Zip2 in 1995 and sold it in 1999.

He co-founded online payment company X.com in the same year that merged to form PayPal. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 and currently serves as its CEO and CTO, overseeing rocket and spacecraft development. From being an early investor in Tesla in 2004, to becoming its CEO and product architect in 2008, he played a key role in the company's success and its rise to the top as a leader in electric vehicles.

To advance artificial intelligence (AI) research, he co-founded OpenAI in 2015. In 2022, he acquired the social media platform Twitter and in the following year rebranded it as X. To take advantage of the AI boom, he established xAI in the 2020s which became a subsidiary of SpaceX in 2026. Neurotechnology company Neuralink and the tunneling company the Boring Company are listed among some of his other businesses.

Elon Musk's top quotes on success and innovation

1. “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”
2. “I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.”
3. “There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.”
4. “It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.”
5. “Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.”
6. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.”
7. “It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don’t know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive.”
8. “A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies.”
9. “People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.”
10. “If you’re co-founder or CEO, you have to do all kinds of tasks you might not want to do… If you don’t do your chores, the company won’t succeed… No task is too menial.”