… but Obsesses Over the How and the What
September 12, 2025
National Geographic, Mars: Inside SpaceX, 2018.
Simon Sinek gave a TED Talk in 2009 which went viral. He told the audience that great leaders are visionaries who do not fixate on the how and the what but change the world by inspiring everyone with their why. This sets them apart.
Sinek used examples like the Wright brothers, Walt Disney, Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher, even Martin Luther King Jr., and above all Steve Jobs.
Elon Musk was not on Sinek’s radar back then but the “vision thing” is often used to describe his approach. Musk definitely understands its power. “People work better,” Musk told The Guardian in 2010, “when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.” Musk has a gift for projecting the long-term purposes of his companies. A lot of Tesla employees, for example, feel that their company has done more than any other to aid the environment by transforming the automotive industry. Similarly, employees are drawn to SpaceX because they are excited by the dream of Mars and the ambition to make life multiplanetary.
Musk, however, does not fit Sinek’s mold. The why that Sinek starts with is more of a brand why, whereas Musk starts with a personal why and drives it home with a rigorous product why. Before looking closely at Musk, let’s unpack Sinek’s preferred case study of Apple.
Why→How→What
Sinek suggests that leaders should focus first and foremost on the why of their organization and let colleagues focus on what happens downstream of that – quite how the vision is implemented and what is produced for followers to consume. It is brilliant advice from the marketing point of view of building brand loyalty, something that makes sense when you know that Sinek’s background is in advertising. I should know because I invested in the British premium paint company Farrow & Ball. What we were selling was paint but our why was to inspire people who believed they had the taste to create beautiful homes.
Jobs too inspired his customers, portraying Apple as a technology enabler of individuals who might change the world. Its iconic “1984” and “Think Different” ad campaigns contrasted Apple with IBM and Microsoft. This had the merit of being true, too, for Jobs not only thought differently but also had amazing taste (and he knew it!).
Apple’s iconic advertising campaigns, launched in 1984 and 1997.
Placing excessive weight on the brand why is a misreading, though, of Jobs, just as it is for Musk. It massively understates the importance of the how and the what and the degree to which leaders like Jobs and Musk are involved in the details of both. Farrow & Ball puts a lot of titanium dioxide in the paint which gives it its signature chalky finish but it does not obsess over the product in the way that Jobs did and Musk does. Such leaders consistently say that coming up with the idea is the easy part. Turning it into reality – the what – is the hard part. And they speak to the importance of constant iteration to come up with new things – namely the how – channelling Thomas Edison’s dictum that “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
The Personal Why
An alternative reason that great leaders “start with why” is that when the how and the what get really hard, they need a deeply held purpose to make them stick with the task. Sinek’s study suffers from survivorship bias because he does not look at the leaders who did not persevere through the setbacks and never became great. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols, “if we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how.” We expect this of philosophers and preachers like Martin Luther King Jr. but it can be true of engineers too.
The legendary venture capitalist John Doerr went so far as to say that the best tech companies are led by “missionaries” who are driven by purpose to make an impact on the world rather than simply “mercenaries” who are motivated solely by money. Joy Covey, the first CFO of Amazon, also identified this when she wrote to Jeff Bezos’ biographer, Brad Stone, after reading Walter Isaacson’s biography about Steve Jobs. Stone describes in The Everything Store how she was struck that both men attracted people “who really need to work on things they can internalize and adopt as mission.” Doerr saw the attribute in the founders he backed at Amazon, Google, Netscape, and a host of other companies. They all think long term and relish solving an array of very challenging problems with constant innovation.
Here Musk is an extreme case. Sinek correctly observed that, when Musk was asked by Chris Anderson at a 2017 TED Talk why he did what he did, Musk just didn’t understand the question. For Musk, the question was the wrong way around. It should be why would you not work hard to make the future better?
Musk says he is motivated by an abstract religion of curiosity which finds meaning through increasing consciousness to augment our understanding of the answer that is the universe (see previous blog post). The corresponding personal why for Jobs was related to his own quest to achieve enlightenment through art and Eastern spirituality. Though his beliefs are different from Musk’s, what they share is an intensity of belief. It is a mindset: they are not just motivated to do what they do – they are obsessed.
Some of this obsessive personal why infuses the vision of the company when it comes from the lips of the founder and this helps them unify their teams to strive toward a shared goal. Some customers also develop a cult-like reverence for the charismatic Leader. The personal why, however, remains distinct from the brand why of the organization. Apple fans didn’t buy their first iPhone because Jobs was a Buddhist and Tesla enthusiasts don’t buy the Cybertruck because they are curious about the nature of reality.
Musk likes to inspire but he prefers to do so by what he makes rather than what he says. SpaceX is a great example of this. Back in 2001, in fact, he planned a mission to send some plants to Mars to inspire the public. This was about inspiration. But when that didn’t work, he set about building rockets that demonstrated that going to Mars was more than just a dream and he has been at it ever since.
Sinek over-emphasizes the brand why because he draws a false distinction between why-driven difference-makers who think differently and how-driven entrepreneurs who love to build things (this is somewhat ironic as Sinek does both through his writing and speaking). For Musk – like Jobs – it is hard to contest that they are one and the same thing.
The Product Why
Tony Fadell, the man behind the iPod, gives a better sense of the product-focused reality of what happened at Apple in his book Build:
Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer’s problem … That “why” is the most critical part of product development – it has to come first. Once you have a strong answer for why your product is needed, then you can focus on how it works. … You can’t just hit the customers on the head with the “what” before you tell them the “why.”
The reason to start with why, in other words, is that you have to imagine what the customer doesn’t yet know they want. This must come from within as it cannot come from the customer. That is the “vision thing” in practice. Sure, Apple’s customers appreciated the brand values of Apple and the charisma of its CEO (when Jobs was in charge), but they were also signing up to experience a stream of cutting-edge devices that Apple’s competitors could only copy. Yes, Jobs did some memorable ad campaigns but, as Fadell relates, he also said that “the best marketing is just telling the truth.”
Musk’s companies are very similar. His version of Fadell’s why-how-what would be something like the following:
Why: Think of the Platonic ideal of what you are making and work backwards to how it can be made. It doesn’t yet exist so you must think from first principles, not by copying with variations.
How: To get close to the ideal, innovate faster than anyone else by pushing existing technologies to the limit and then deliver at scale.
What: It won’t be the ideal but with each groundbreaking product, you can get closer – from commercial EVs to reusable orbital rockets, to satellite internet.
In the early days of Tesla, Musk was happy to draw attention to the environmental “why” of electric vehicles. The state of California had previously mandated that automakers produce zero-emission vehicles and it became cool to drive a Toyota Prius and even cooler to drive a Tesla Roadster. But when Tesla unveiled the Model S prototype in 2009, what it was selling was the “what” – the product. Musk wanted to make the best car in the world and many auto critics agreed that he did: it was stylish; it addressed the EV issues of range and charging; and it had incredible acceleration. Musk brought in George Blankenship from Apple to roll out showrooms and to oversee the sales of the car, but there would be no advertising campaigns crafted to tug on the heartstrings.
Musk follows this approach at multiple companies at the same time. It is his modus operandi. And in the case of SpaceX, the customers don’t even care about the brand why (although this is changing with Starlink). They are government agencies and satellite operators that care about their mission – not Musk’s – which is to get their payloads into space.
Even more so than Jobs, Musk obsesses over every detail of his products, both software and hardware. Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who knew Jobs well, is quoted in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk as remarking of Jobs and Musk that “OCD is one of the reasons for their success, because they obsessed on solving a problem until they did. What set them apart is that Musk, unlike Jobs, applied that obsession not just to the design of a product but also the underlying science, engineering, and manufacturing.”
Sinek was not wrong when he credited Steve Wozniak for leading the “how” at Apple. Wozniak himself admits that he could not have made Apple what it became, just as Paul Allen could not have built Microsoft by himself. But, in the case of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk is a combination of both Wozniak and Jobs, of Allen and Gates. He recruits brilliant engineers but, when the issues at hand are important enough, he believes that no details should be delegated to others. Netscape and A16Z cofounder Marc Andreessen describes Musk well when he says that every week he focuses on the most critical bottleneck in the company that needs fixing. And he does that week after week.
In case there might be a doubt, however, as to whether Musk’s personal why takes second place to his product why, the answer is emphatically no. Musk’s association with President Trump in 2024 risked alienating a lot of Tesla customers and that is precisely what happened, but Musk was unmoved. Most CEOs bite their lip when it comes to politics but not Musk who disregarded the wishes of a lot of would-be customers and took a big hit for it. In this judgment, he was probably influenced by his belief that the perception of a brand’s value goes up and down but, in the long run, it correlates to the reality of how good its products are.
Inspiring Words
Having studied Musk and his peers for several years, I would certainly recommend reading Start With Why. It’s important to know, however, that while Sinek’s intentions are noble – in his own words, he wants to inspire people to do things that inspire them – common to a lot of “inspiration” gurus, he only tells half the story. He picks illustrious examples of rare “great” leaders to inspire us and would have us believe that we can be successful like them if we emulate them.
What does Musk have to say about this? “If you need inspiring words, don’t do it,” he told students of Draper University in 2012. He was talking about the experience of starting a company which he described as being so painful that it is just not for most people.
It is slightly disingenuous to say that one can be like an iconic visionary founder without recognizing how obsessive they are and how abnormal this is. It would be fair to advise business leaders that they should be focused, not lose sight of the big picture and communicate clearly. But people like Musk and Jobs are not the best role models for this because they combine it with a “hardcore” intensity that Sinek does not address. They are obsessed to such a degree that they cannot turn it on and off. In that sense, Carol Dweck’s 2006 classic Mindset might be a better guide on how to succeed. She uses famous people like Michael Jordan, Coach Wooden and Jackie Joyner-Kersee as examples but she emphasizes the mindset to learn and improve by overcoming challenges with effort, which is reflected in the book’s strapline – How We Can Fulfill our Potential.
To understand what you can and cannot learn from a person like Musk, there are several things one must first appreciate. Musk doesn’t read leadership books to “think different”: he simply doesn’t know how not to think differently. He hasn’t spent time crafting a visionary mission statement: he just doesn’t understand why everyone is doing the same thing when he sees a better alternative. He doesn’t work for himself in order to be authentic: he wouldn’t know how to work for someone else. And he doesn’t try to be creative: he is just trying to solve problems and understands how technology can help him do this. The same goes for Orville and Wilbur Wright with airplanes, Kelleher with budget airlines, and even Martin Luther King Jr. with his soaring televised speeches.
Furthermore, it’s easy to make role models out of obsessive people by picking and choosing which traits you want to emphasize. Joy Covey observed that, besides being mission-driven, people like Jobs and Bezos share a “sometimes-harsh” intensity which Covey surmised is perhaps common to ambitious, disruptive founders. This sits at odds with the notion of creating a “circle of safety” which Sinek praised in his second book Leaders Eat Last. It is certainly not how Musk runs his businesses. At Twitter, for example, he didn’t think that the online experience should be a safe space and he fired 80% of the employees to get his way. As with Tesla, his personal why (which shapes his absolutist view on free speech) rode roughshod over the company’s brand and alienated Twitter’s largest advertising customers.
Just Start
Even if you conclude that Musk is not a good role model, there is something very valuable to be learned from his example. It doesn’t require inspiring others or even trying to be great. It is to build things that didn’t previously exist. The Wright brothers created the biplane Flyer in Kitty Hawk. Kelleher pioneered the point-to-point model of Southwest Airlines in Texas. Martin Luther King Jr. helped build a non-violent movement for civil rights that changed the United States. And Musk has built products which have reshaped multiple industries.
In fact, the practical advice that Musk himself gives to everyone is not to copy great leaders but simply to be useful. Don’t worry so much about the why. Skip straight to the how and solve problems that you come across. That’s how most big start-ups begin. Making things just happens to be the optimal way to do this.
“I don’t know what to make,” is the common response. It’s a bit of an excuse, though. Just look around. How could you be useful? In fact, one might even say: If you’re not sure of your why, just start. You will persevere with it, once you find something you really care about.
This is the second in a series of blogs on How Musk Thinks. If you are interested in receiving blog updates, please sign up.
The Curious Mind of Elon Musk: 9 Ways He Thinks Differently will be published in 2026 by Greenleaf Book Group.
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