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Quote of the Day by Elon Musk: 'I think you should always bear ...' 

Quote of the Day by Elon Musk: 'I think you should always bear ...' 

Elon Musk is a prominent billionaire entrepreneur, engineer, and tech mogul best known for founding and leading groundbreaking companies in space exploration, electric vehicles, and artificial intelligence.

Business Today Desk
Business Today Desk
  • Updated Jul 11, 2026 7:30 AM IST
Quote of the Day by Elon Musk: 'I think you should always bear ...' lon Musk, CEO and Founder of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company

“I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.” An insightful quote by Elon Musk, CEO and Founder of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company.

The quote emphasises that life does not change overnight, and managing the day-to-day grind requires a disciplined, long-term mindset rather than seeking immediate results.

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Who is Elon Musk 

Elon Musk is a prominent billionaire entrepreneur, engineer, and tech mogul best known for founding and leading groundbreaking companies in space exploration, electric vehicles, and artificial intelligence. Beyond electric cars and rockets, his current focus spans a massive empire of cutting-edge industries, including his brain-computer interface firm Neuralink, tunnel-construction business The Boring Company, and his generative AI startup xAI. 

Musk consistently ranks as the wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth tracking between $912 billion and $956 billion according to real-time billionaire indexes from Forbes and Bloomberg. This historic level of personal wealth is primarily anchored in his significant equity stakes in Tesla and SpaceX. It has been supercharged by a massive 2026 industrial ecosystem merger with his generative AI startup, xAI.

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Musk’s technical, aerospace, and business leadership has earned him some of the highest distinct honours in science and industry. He is an elected fellow of the Royal Society and a peer-elected member of the National Academy of Engineering. His work in rocketry has won him prestigious aerospace accolades like the FAI Gold Space Medal and the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication.

When was this quote said by Elon Musk?

Elon Musk said this on September 15, 2016, during a live-streamed interview with Sam Altman for the Y Combinator video series "How to Build the Future".

He used entropy to explain why technology and civilisations do not automatically improve over time. He pointed out that history is full of societies that advanced and then completely forgot their own technology.

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What does this quote mean? 

Musk’s statement means that progress and success are never automatic; instead, things naturally decay, break down, and fall into chaos if left alone. In physics, entropy is the law that systems left to themselves always become disordered. Musk applies this rule to human effort, arguing that technology, businesses, and entire civilisations do not automatically improve over time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Business Today Desk
Business Today Desk

Business Today brings you the latest news, views and analysis from the world of finance, economy, markets, corporates, startups, tech, and the digital economy. You can find everything from breaking news to deep dives to immersive essays and more on a variety of subjects across all formats - online, magazine, television, data visualisation, et al.

Published on: Jul 11, 2026 7:30 AM IST