Elon Musk on building a company: “There are periods where it’s just awful”

I think that a lot of times people think creating companies can be fun. I would say it's really not that fun. 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 like the worst. You have a filter for the crappiest problem in the company, the most pernicious and painful problem. So I wouldn't say, I think you have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold. And there's a friend of mine who says, like, starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass. And there's some truth to that. The staring into the abyss part is that you're going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because most startups fail. It's like 90%, arguably 99% of startups fail. So that. That's the staring into the abyss part. You're constantly saying, okay, if I don't get this right, the company will die. It should be quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you've got to do the problems. You've got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. And so you end up working on problems, problems that you'd really wish you weren't working on. And so that's the eating glass part. And that goes on for a long time. So how do you.