Peter Thiel on Elon Musk’s success: “Maybe the rest of us are too risk averse”

“When Elon was building both Tesla and SpaceX in the 2000s, people thought he was just really, really crazy. Even those of us who’d worked with him at PayPal. There was this PayPal book that David Sacks and I thought of writing, and the Elon chapter was I think entitled something like ‘The Man Who Knew Nothing About Risk’ or something like this. There are all these crazy Elon stories I could tell.”

Thiel continues:

“If one of the two companies had succeeded, you would say, well, maybe he got really lucky. But when two out of two companies that people thought were completely harebrained in the 2000s - when they both succeed, you have to reassess it. Maybe the rest of us are somehow too risk averse or there’s something about risk he knows that we don’t.”

Full video: The Aspen Institute “The Iconoclast“ (Jun 2024)

P.S. We’ve put together a YouTube playlist with every Peter Thiel insight we’ve ever shared. You can watch it here: “Best startup advice from Peter Thiel”