Quote of the day by Elon Musk: “Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into…” – brutally honest lesson on entrepreneurship, resilience and the hidden reality behind building a business | World News
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Entrepreneurship is often described as exciting, glamorous and full of promise. Elon Musk described it very differently. “Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death,” he said, letting out his trademark cackle right after. He was not joking around for effect. He said this only months after taking Tesla public, during one of the hardest stretches of his own career, so the words came from real, lived experience rather than a rehearsed soundbite. It is one of the most honest lines ever said about starting a company, precisely because it skips the usual encouragement and simply describes what the experience actually felt like, without trying to make any of it sound easier than it was.
Quote of the day by Elon Musk
“Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death”
Where did Musk actually said it
Musk said this on stage at the Founder Showcase event in 2010, shortly after Tesla had gone public, in his first public appearance since the IPO. In that same conversation, he described December 2008 as one of the worst periods of his life, a stretch that included a failed SpaceX rocket launch, Tesla’s funding falling through, and his own public divorce all happening within the same brief window.
What the two images are actually describing
Musk later broke the metaphor down more precisely in a separate interview with Khan Academy, explaining “staring into the abyss” as the constant background awareness that the overwhelming majority of startups fail, meaning a founder is repeatedly telling themselves that getting the next decision wrong could genuinely end the company. “Eating glass” he described as having to work on whatever problem the company actually needs solved, not the problem you would rather be working on, for as long as that discomfort continues.
Why the visible part of success hides most of the story
The public only sees the finished product, the launch, the funding round, the headline. What rarely gets seen is the string of failed experiments and stalled ideas that came before it, which most founders, including highly successful ones, go through repeatedly on the way to anything that actually works.
Why resilience tends to matter more than confidence
Confidence gets someone started. It rarely determines whether they keep going once the plan stops working the way it was supposed to. Every business runs into obstacles nobody predicted, and the founders who keep adapting through those obstacles tend to end up in a stronger position over time than the ones who simply started out more certain of themselves.
Other famous quotes by Elon Musk
- “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
- “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour.”
- “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”
- “Great companies are built on great products.”
What it means in today’s world
Technology has made it easier than ever to launch something new, but the underlying experience Musk described has not really changed. Building something genuinely new still means uncertainty, repeated setbacks, and long stretches of working on exactly the problem you would rather avoid. His line strips the glamour away deliberately, on the theory that anyone actually starting a company deserves the honest version rather than the comfortable one.