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“If you want to make money, don’t try to make money.
Try to be useful to as many people as possible.”
In November 2025, Elon Musk dropped this line during a conversation with Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath. Within 48 hours, it crossed 7 million views—not because it sounds profound, but because it cuts straight through the excuses and illusions that dominate the modern startup world.
In an era where 90% of startups still die within three years, founders continue chasing the next billion-dollar fantasy instead of focusing on the only question that truly matters:
“How do I become a net contributor to humanity at scale?”
This mindset—simple, almost annoyingly obvious—is the hidden engine behind Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and Musk’s entire philosophy of building for civilisation rather than capital.
Money follows usefulness.
Not the other way around.
The Mental Model Behind Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink
Tesla wasn’t built to be a trillion-dollar car company.
It was built to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
SpaceX wasn’t created to mint billionaires.
It was built so humanity isn’t trapped on one fragile planet.
Neuralink isn’t about gadgets.
It’s about giving paralysed people the ability to control devices with their thoughts, and eventually creating a safe human-AI interface.
In every case, the mission came first.
Profit arrived slowly—sometimes painfully—but it arrived because the usefulness was undeniable.
Tesla’s revenue didn’t grow 20× from 2015 to 2025 because of marketing tricks.
It grew because they made EVs that surpassed petrol cars in performance, cost per km, safety, and sheer joy of use.
Usefulness at planetary scale created value at planetary scale.
The 2025 Reality Check
We are now in the most brutal entrepreneurial climate in history:
- Interest rates remain high; capital isn’t cheap anymore.
- Customer acquisition costs are exploding.
- AI is destroying 80% of “clever SaaS ideas” overnight.
- Attention spans have collapsed to fractions of a second.
In this world, only one thing survives:
Usefulness.
Not growth hacks.
Not virality.
Not even product-market fit—because markets shift, trends die, and attention evaporates.
But usefulness compounds.
Usefulness scales.
Usefulness is permanent.
How to Apply Elon’s “Be Useful” Framework Immediately
1. Ask the uncomfortable question
“If my company disappeared tomorrow, who—besides employees and investors—would genuinely miss us?”
If the answer is “almost no one,” you’re building a vitamin, not a painkiller.
Fix the core value, not the marketing.
2. Measure contribution, not vanity
Track metrics that actually matter:
- Hours of human life saved
- CO₂ reduced or prevented
- People gaining mobility, income, literacy, or dignity
- Skills created
- Problems removed, permanently
These are the North Stars of a resilient company.
3. Build second-order usefulness
Great companies don’t just solve a problem—they enable others to solve bigger ones.
Stripe didn’t simply make payments easy.
It unlocked millions of new businesses that now employ tens of millions.
That’s second-order usefulness.
4. Embrace the lag between usefulness and revenue
Amazon bled money for 20+ quarters.
Tesla operated at a loss for 17 years.
Not because they were inefficient, but because they were investing in usefulness that the world would eventually reward.
Usefulness compounds quietly.
Revenue arrives violently.
After years of studying founders, investing in startups, and watching thousands rise and fall, a single pattern stands undefeated:
The founders who become genuinely wealthy are the ones who stop chasing money and start chasing usefulness at scale.
The ones who obsess over money first?
They almost always get neither money nor impact.
If you’re building anything in 2025—your first side project, your fifth pivot, your tenth attempt at a breakout—etch this principle into your decision-making:
Make money by refusing to chase money.
Create wealth by giving the world something it desperately needs.
Be useful.
Everything else follows.
Musk isn’t rich by accident.
He’s rich because usefulness—real, measurable usefulness—is the strongest economic engine in existence.
Now go build something undeniably useful.
The world is waiting.
