Elon Musk's secrets to business success

1. It isn't about the money
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This is absolutely central to Elon Musk's attitude to business. He said he didn't know how rich he was.
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"It's not as if there is a pile of cash somewhere,"" he said. "It's really just that I have a certain number of votes in Tesla, and SpaceX, and SolarCity, and the marketplace has value on those votes.""
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He doesn't have anything against the pursuit of wealth ""if it's done in sort of an ethical and good manner"", but said it just isn't what drives him.
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2. Pursue your passions
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That Mars base is a clue to what Elon Musk believes is the key to success.
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"You want things in the future to be better,"". ""You want these new exciting things that make life better."
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Take SpaceX. He set the company up because he was frustrated the US space programme wasn't more ambitious.
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"I kept expecting us to advance beyond Earth, and to put a person on Mars, and have a base on the moon, and have, you know, very frequent flights to orbit," he said.
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When that didn't happen, he came up with the idea for the "Mars Oasis Mission", which aimed to send a small greenhouse to the red planet.
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It was while he was trying to get that off the ground he realised the problem wasn't "a lack of will, but rather a lack of way" - space technology was far more expensive than it needed to be.
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Et voila! The world's cheapest rocket-launching business was born.
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3. Don't be afraid to think big
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One of the really striking things about Elon Musk's businesses is how audacious they are. He wants to revolutionise the car industry, colonise Mars, build super-fast trains in vacuum tunnels, integrate AI into human brains and upend the solar power and battery industries.
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Which brings us to Musk's third business tip - don't hold back.
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He believes low ambition is baked into most companies' incentive structures. Too many companies are "incrementalist", he said.
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So, his advice is to make sure you are working on what he calls ""stuff that's going to matter".