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Elon Musk: “Failure is irrelevant unless it’s catastrophic”

February 09, 2026

Elon is asked why he’s so tolerant of the failure that often stems from taking big risks, to which he responds:

“I think of these things as: There’s a certain amount of time, and within that time, you want the best net outcome. For the set of actions you can do, there will be some which will fail and some which will succeed. And you want the net useful output of your actions to be the highest.”

He uses baseball as an analogy:

“You can’t just sit there and wait for the perfect pitch . . . So what you’re really looking for is: What’s the batting average? There’s going to be some amount of failure. You just want your net useful output to be maximized. Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it’s catastrophic.”