Elon Musk explains why the CEO must work on the “most pernicious and painful problems”

A lot of times people think creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it's really not that fun. I mean, there are periods of fun and there are periods where it's just awful. And particularly if you're the CEO of the company, you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company. There's no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong. And there are things that are going wrong that other people can't take care of. So you have a filter for the crappiest problem in the company, the most pernicious and painful problem. And there's a friend of mine who says starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass. The staring into the abyss part is that you're going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company. Most startups fail. Arguably, 99% of startups fail. That's the staring into the abyss part. You're constantly saying, okay, if I don't get this right, the company will die. And then the eating glass part is you got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. And that goes on for a long time.