Elon Musk, entrepreneur: “If things aren’t failing, you’re not innovating”

Few phrases better summarize Elon Musk's business philosophy than this one. The entrepreneur, at the helm of companies such as SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and The Boring Company, has stated it in its most complete version preceded by a declaration of intent: failure is an option here. It is one of his most repeated quotes, and his own trajectory offers abundant examples that support it.

The idea originated as a reply to a motto closely associated with the U.S. space agency. In a 2015 interview about SpaceX, Musk called the notion that at NASA failure is not an option absurd, and argued exactly the opposite for his company.

Elon Musk: a philosophy with costs and 3 lost rockets

The history of SpaceX illustrates the phrase well. The first three Falcon 1 launches failed between 2006 and 2008, and the company was on the verge of bankruptcy before the fourth attempt reached orbit in September 2008. Years later, Starship's development has followed the same logic: prototypes that explode during testing, which the company treats as data to improve the next design.

That approach is supported by another of his recurring ideas. At an energy conference held in Norway, Musk advised starting from the premise that one is wrong and making it a goal to be wrong less and less often.

The method also has its less pleasant side. In the biography Walter Isaacson published in 2023, Tom Mueller, one of the lead designers of the Merlin engine, recalled that this way of working demoralized teams, although he acknowledged that it allowed them to achieve things other companies could not, despite failing to meet the deadlines and cost targets set by Musk.

The phrase connects with Silicon Valley's culture of failing fast in order to learn sooner, but it is not praise for error in and of itself. What Musk is suggesting is that the total absence of failures may indicate that not enough risk is being taken. Being wrong, in his logic, only has value if something is learned from it and the course is corrected quickly.