3 Rules You Can Learn From Elon Musk to Be Bolder: Records, Data and a Calculated-Risk Test (2026)

TL;DR. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2025/2026 Global Report, in 14 of the 48 economies in the adult population survey, or about 29%, more than half of adults who see a good business opportunity say fear of failure would stop them from starting a business; in 2019 the share of economies in this position was 16%. In the same data, adults who exited a business in the past 12 months (by closing it or handing it over) are more inclined to start a business again in 47 of the 48 economies. This refreshed article checks the quotes the earlier version attributed to Elon Musk against primary records and puts three documented events in their place: SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket made its first successful launch on 28 September 2008 after three failed attempts (NASA), Tesla’s 2010 IPO prospectus stated plainly that the company had posted a net loss in every quarter since its inception (SEC), and the South Australia battery pledge was tied to a written delivery deadline and a “free if late” condition. CEO move: tie a bold decision to a written commitment, a loss ceiling known in advance and a kill criterion. Student move: after every failed attempt, write one sentence on what you will change in the next one.

This article is part of CEOtudent’s decision-making series. To separate decisions you can reverse from those you cannot, see the one-way and two-way doors framework; for big, irreversible life decisions, the regret minimization framework; to decide in advance when to drop an attempt, the kill criteria guide; and for thinking in probabilities, the thinking in bets guide. The tables from those articles are not repeated here; this one adds new data and a test on courage itself.

Why was this article rewritten, and what changed?

The first version was published in 2021 and last updated in 2022. It cited a column in a business magazine as its source and relayed three rules Elon Musk supposedly “practiced”, two direct quotes attributed to Musk and several biographical claims. During the refresh, each claim was searched for in a text Musk published himself, in a company or government record, or in a dated transcript released by the publisher. For the classic quotes, the original text of each work was opened.

As a result:

• Verified claims were kept with their source, inaccurate ones were corrected, and those with no primary record were removed; no words were put in anyone’s mouth.
• The “rules” became lessons drawn from three events documented in the records.
• 2025 data on fear of failure (GEM) and peer-reviewed research on risk-taking and learning from failure were added.
• Ad code, old in-body images and automatic internal links were removed from the body.

How were the claims in the old article tested against primary records?

The table below shows the audit result for every claim in the old version. The verdict column takes three values: verified, corrected, unverifiable – removed.

Old claim	Verdict	Primary record
“Those who dare nothing should not hope for anything.” (Schiller)	Verified, context added	Schiller, Wallensteins Lager, Scene 7 (Auftritt): “Wer nichts waget, der darf nichts hoffen.” The line is spoken by a sergeant (Wachtmeister) trying to persuade a young man to join the army.
Musk founded Tesla.	Corrected	Tesla’s 2010 prospectus: the company was incorporated in Delaware on 1 July 2003; as of 2010, Musk had been chairman of the board since April 2004 and CEO since October 2008, and the prospectus describes him as one of its founders.
The “3 simple rules” Musk follows for courage (the riskiest decision is not taking risks; be a pioneer in failure; embrace the Viking spirit)	Unverifiable – removed	No such list published by Musk was found; the list is a compilation from a column.
Musk failed in at least five industries (payments, cars, space, transportation, batteries).	Unverifiable – removed	No primary record makes this count. The concrete setbacks visible in the records: Falcon 1’s first three attempts (NASA) and Tesla’s net loss in every quarter from its inception to 2010 (SEC).
“And today it makes him the richest person in the world.”	Unverifiable – removed	Wealth rankings come from media indexes, are not primary records and change constantly; they are also unrelated to the topic of courage.
Musk gave himself 100 days to fix South Australia’s energy grid and said anyone could take advantage of it for free.	Corrected	South Australian Premier’s news release, 7 July 2017: the pledge was to deliver the battery within 100 days or provide it free; the 100-day clock would start once the grid interconnection agreement was signed. The “anyone can use it for free” wording is not in the record.
Marcus Aurelius: “You have the power to control your mind, you cannot control external events.”	Corrected	This sentence does not appear in George Long’s translation of the Meditations; the closest passage is VIII.47. The remarks that “the book is very popular among entrepreneurs” and that “the first to apply it was probably Musk” were removed.
CNN interview: when founding Tesla and SpaceX, he put his chance of success below 50%.	Unverifiable – removed	Not found in any dated transcript published by CNN.
“If our ancestors thought that way, the United States wouldn’t exist.”	Unverifiable – removed	No primary record, such as a speech text, a transcript or Musk’s own publication, was found.
The claim that Musk embodies the Finnish concept of “sisu”, the comparison with explorers and the list of traits sisu supposedly brings	Unverifiable – removed	Unsourced characterization; no record links it to Musk.
The “regrets area” concept	Unverifiable – removed	Unsourced term. The same question can be approached through the regret minimization framework.

Sources: Schiller, Wallensteins Lager (original German text); Tesla Motors, Form 424B4 prospectus (2010); NASA SP-2014-617 (2014); South Australian Premier’s news release (7 July 2017); Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by George Long.

The context of the two classic quotes is instructive in its own right. Schiller’s line comes not from a sage but from a sergeant recruiting soldiers; in the lines just before it, the young man is told he is about to set sail on “Fortuna’s ship”. Looking at who is making a call to courage, and with what interest, is the first step of calculated risk. In the Long translation, Marcus Aurelius’s passage VIII.47 opens: “If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now.” The same passage asks the reader who is pained at not doing something that seems right: “why dost thou not rather act than complain?” The paraphrase in the old article was not entirely cut off from this idea, but the text contains no such sentence; the accurate approach is to give the translation and the passage number.

How widespread is fear of failure around the world?

GEM bases its 2025/2026 Global Report, published on 26 February 2026, on responses from over 160,000 individuals across 53 economies; 48 of these economies took part in the Adult Population Survey (APS). The survey asks two questions in sequence: will there be good opportunities to start a business in your area in the next six months, and, among those who see such opportunities, who agrees that “there are good opportunities but I would not start a business for fear it might fail”.

The report’s own summary is clear: in most participating economies, at least two in five adults who recognize good opportunities are held back by the personal and financial costs of failure. In 27 of the 48 economies, this share is between four and five in ten. The highest fear is measured in the Slovak Republic, Argentina and Saudi Arabia, the lowest in the Republic of Korea, Switzerland and Venezuela. The share of economies where more than half of those who see opportunities are held back by fear rose from 16% in 2019 to 29% in 2025.

Economy	See good business opportunities in their area (% adults)	See an opportunity but would not start a business for fear of failure (% of those seeing opportunities)
Republic of Korea	38.3	27.0
Switzerland	43.4	31.4
Germany	52.9	40.6
United States	51.8	42.4
France	43.3	42.7
Brazil	64.7	48.2
United Kingdom	55.8	49.6
Spain	41.9	52.0
India	78.3	56.8
Saudi Arabia	96.5	61.3
Argentina	48.0	62.1
Slovak Republic	36.7	66.9

Source: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, GEM 2025/2026 Global Report, Appendix Table A2 (2025 Adult Population Survey). Values as printed in the report.

The two columns have different denominators: the first is a percentage of all adults, the second only of those who see opportunities. The report itself notes that the two measures are not directly comparable, and it states that there is little observable relationship between fear and income level.

How much opportunity does fear leave on the table?

The GEM table gives two separate rates. Multiplying them answers a more concrete question: what percentage of adults in an economy both see a good opportunity and hold back out of fear? The same table also gives the shares of adults who exited a business in the past 12 months (that is, closed or handed over their business) and of adults who did not, who expect to start a business in the next three years. The table below sets these two calculations side by side.

Economy	See an opportunity but hold back out of fear (approx. % adults)	Exited a business in past 12 months: expect to start one within 3 years (%)	Did not exit a business: expect to start one within 3 years (%)	Ratio (times)
Republic of Korea	10.3	61.5	29.0	2.1
Switzerland	13.6	33.9	14.7	2.3
Germany	21.5	68.0	16.4	4.1
United States	22.0	56.6	17.9	3.2
France	18.5	50.4	18.3	2.8
Brazil	31.2	63.9	45.0	1.4
United Kingdom	27.7	77.8	24.9	3.1
Spain	21.8	49.7	12.4	4.0
India	44.5	64.9	27.3	2.4
Saudi Arabia	59.2	81.1	43.1	1.9
Argentina	29.8	42.5	15.6	2.7
Slovak Republic	24.6	54.9	14.8	3.7

CEOtudent analysis: calculated from GEM 2025/2026 Global Report, Appendix Table A2 data. First column = share seeing opportunities x fear rate / 100; because the fear rate is measured among those seeing opportunities, the result is an approximation. Last column = rate among those who exited / rate among those who did not. The two middle columns are as printed in the report.

Three observations stand out:

1. Fear is strong even where opportunity is most abundant. Across all 48 economies, the median of the calculated “see an opportunity but hold back” share is about 27.5%. In Saudi Arabia, 96.5% of adults say they see an opportunity, yet this high optimism coexists with roughly 59% of adults seeing the opportunity and holding back out of fear.
2. Experience works against fear. Adults who exited a business are more inclined to start one again in 47 of the 48 economies; the only exception is Ecuador (41.1% versus 42.7%). Across the 48 economies, the rate among those who exited is, at the median, about 2.6 times the rate among those who did not.
3. This is not evidence of causation. Those who exited a business had already started one, which means they had already tried taking a risk. GEM also notes in a footnote that many exits are not failures, even though the majority of exits are for negative reasons.

Read through the CEO and student lens, the table says this: fear of failure grows most when it stays abstract, attached to something never tried. Having tried once and exited turns the fear into a concrete cost calculation. In your own decisions, too, the goal is not to look brave but to reduce fear to a measurable loss ceiling.

Rule 1: How do you turn a bold promise into a written commitment?

Here is the version of the South Australia story from the old article that the records confirm. The 7 July 2017 news release from South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill confirms the commitment from Tesla CEO Elon Musk to deliver the battery within 100 days or provide it free, and states that Tesla and the state government agreed the 100-day period would start once the grid interconnection agreement had been signed. The battery, with 100 MW of power and 129 MWh of capacity, was to be paired with Neoen’s Hornsdale Wind Farm. The release refers to a multi-stage procurement process that attracted around 90 responses.

There are post-project records as well. The Hornsdale Power Reserve page of Neoen, which operates the project, states that the first 100 MW/129 MWh stage was completed in November 2017. In its April 2018 report, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) writes that the battery was commissioned in late 2017, that the 129 MWh capacity represents approximately 75 minutes at full discharge, and that its services are provided under commercial agreements between the state government, Tesla and Neoen. Because the primary records opened do not give the signing date on which the 100-day clock started, the exact number of days the project took is not calculated here.

The core of the lesson is not courage itself but the structure of the bold promise. The promise was tied to four elements: a measurable deliverable (100 MW/129 MWh), a deadline (100 days), the point at which the clock would start (the grid interconnection agreement) and the price of failure (delivery free of charge). The cost of failure had been defined in advance.

• CEO move: When you set a bold goal, write down four elements: what will be delivered, by when, when the clock starts, and what it costs if you miss.
• Student move: Before announcing the promise to anyone, calculate what the cost would be to you or to others. If you cannot cover the cost, shrink the promise.

Rule 2: How does failure become raw material for the next attempt?

NASA’s official 2014 program history (NASA/SP-2014-617) records that Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 using know-how and capital from his previous venture, PayPal, and that after three failed attempts to reach orbit, Falcon 1 made its first successful launch on 28 September 2008 from the island of Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. In the same document, Hans Koenigsmann, who had previously worked as SpaceX Vice President of Guidance and Control, describes the first failure as “heartbreaking” and adds: “We learned a lot of things we did wrong, and learning sometimes hurts.” According to NASA, SpaceX launched Falcon 9 on 4 June 2010, less than two years after Falcon 1’s successful launch. The quote belongs to Koenigsmann, not to Musk.

Two studies balance this story by showing that learning from failure does not happen on its own:

• Yin, Wang, Evans and Wang (2019): examining repeated attempts in three different domains, including NIH grant applications and venture-backed startups, the study shows that those who eventually succeed and those who do not may be similar at the start, yet diverge in the efficiency and quality of each new attempt. Those below a critical threshold try disjoint opportunities and show no improvement; those above it refine the previous attempt step by step.
• Wang, Jones and Wang (2019): the study compares 561 early-career NIH applicants who narrowly cleared the funding threshold with 623 who narrowly missed it. Of the papers the near misses published in the following first five years, 16.1% landed in the top 5% most-cited in their field, compared with 13.3% for the narrow wins. But the cost is real: an early setback markedly increases attrition and, in the authors’ words, predicts more than a 10% chance of disappearing permanently from the NIH system; one year later, the near-miss group had 11.2% fewer active researchers.

Read together, these two findings suggest that failure teaches only the person who stays in the game and builds the next attempt on the previous one. Staying in the game, in turn, requires reserves and an exit rule set in advance.

• CEO move: Set aside a “next attempt budget” for every attempt; do not put all your resources into the first one.
• Student move: After every failure, write three lines: what you expected to happen, what actually happened, and exactly what you are changing in the next attempt. If the third line is blank, no learning has taken place.

Rule 3: Why should risk be written down rather than hidden?

Tesla’s IPO prospectus (Form 424B4), dated 28 June 2010 and filed with the SEC, is a record showing that courage is not about hiding risk. According to the prospectus, the company was incorporated on 1 July 2003 and began selling the Tesla Roadster in 2008. The document states plainly that the company had net losses in each quarter since its inception, that its accumulated deficit was $290.2 million as of 31 March 2010, and that it expected to keep losing money for the foreseeable future. Net losses were reported as $78.2 million in 2007, $82.8 million in 2008, $55.7 million in 2009 and $29.5 million in the first three months of 2010.

There is a limit: disclosing risks in an IPO prospectus is a legal requirement, so this list is the product of regulation, not of a personality trait. Even so, it offers a habit that transfers to individual decisions. Before taking a big step, listing in your own hand why that step could fail both makes the fear concrete and makes it easier to tell which risk is truly fatal. The pre-mortem protocol is a good place to start.

• CEO move: Before a big decision, write a one-page “risk factors” list and mark each item “fatal” or “wounding”.
• Student move: Reread the list six months after the decision and mark which risks materialized and which did not. Your forecasting accuracy sets the quality of your next list.

Are people too cautious in big decisions?

An experiment by economist Steven Levitt, released as an NBER working paper and later published in The Review of Economic Studies, approaches this question from an unusual angle. People who were undecided on the verge of a hard decision flipped a coin on a website; the outcome was random, and participants were surveyed again two and six months later. Over 20,000 coins were flipped in a year.

Findings:

• Those whose coin toss said “make a change” were approximately 25% more likely to report making a change than those whose toss said “stay as you are”.
• For important decisions, such as quitting a job or ending a relationship, making a change was causally related to higher self-reported happiness, especially six months later.
• Levitt’s conclusion: people “may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices.”

The limits are written in the same paper: participants came voluntarily and were not representative, there may have been selection in who completed the surveys, and the responses were self-reported. So the finding does not say “always change”; it shows that for a person standing at the edge of a decision, mistaking the status quo for a safe harbor may carry a cost.

Which five questions should you ask before deciding? (The calculated courage test)

The test below is a CEOtudent editorial framework derived from the three rules and the research above. Score each dimension 0, 1 or 2 points.

Dimension	Question to ask	0 points	1 point	2 points
Loss ceiling	What do you lose in the worst case, and have you written it down in advance?	Unknown, or it puts your entire livelihood at risk	Known but hard to cover	Written down, limited and affordable
Reversibility	Can the decision be undone, and at what cost?	Irreversible	Reversible but expensive	Cheaply and quickly reversible
Learning value	Even if you fail, what will you have learned?	Unclear	A general experience	A measurable lesson written down in advance
Timeline and kill criterion	When, and on what signal, will you stop?	Undefined	Date set, no criterion	Date and measurable criterion written down
Asymmetry	How large is the potential gain relative to the potential loss?	Gain smaller than or equal to the loss	Unclear, no estimate	Gain clearly larger, with the reasoning written down

CEOtudent editorial framework. The score thresholds are an editorial choice, not a statistical scale.

How to read it:

• 8-10 points: Go ahead and put it on the calendar. At this score, fear may not be carrying any new information about the decision.
• 5-7 points: Shrink it and test it with a pilot. Do not take a full-scale step until you improve the low-scoring dimension (usually the loss ceiling or reversibility).
• 0-4 points: Do not postpone; redesign. It is not the decision itself that is weak but its current form.
• Red line: If the loss ceiling scores 0, the decision is redesigned whatever the total score. In the South Australia pledge, the cost of failure (delivery free of charge) was defined in advance; accepting an undefined cost is not courage but surrender to uncertainty.

How does courage become a habit in four weeks? (The four-week courage protocol)

This protocol is a CEOtudent editorial framework designed to turn the test from a one-off exercise into a habit.

• Week 1, define: Write down a decision you have been putting off in one sentence and score it with the five-question test. State the loss ceiling in terms of money, time and reputation.
• Week 1, write down the risks: Draw up the one-page risk factors list and mark each item “fatal” or “wounding”.
• Week 2, shrink: Design the smallest, cheapest and reversible version of the decision. A single customer conversation, a weekend prototype or one application may be enough.
• Week 2, set the kill criterion: Write down in advance on what date and at what measurable signal you will drop the attempt.
• Week 3, try and record: Run the attempt. After each attempt, fill in the three-line learning note.
• Week 4, decide: Check the kill criterion and pick one of three options: scale up, change course or stop. Whichever you choose, write down what you will do differently in the next decision.

What does this article not say?

• It does not say “always take risks.” According to GEM, those who hold back are wary of the perceived personal and financial costs of failure, and those costs are often real. In some situations holding back is the right decision; the test exists to make that distinction.
• It does not urge you to model yourself on one person. The three events in the article were treated as documented events. Musk’s other decisions, personality and public controversies are outside the scope of this article.
• It does not treat correlation as causation. The link between exit and intention in GEM may be affected by selection, the finding of Wang and colleagues rests on those who stayed in the game, and Levitt’s sample is not representative.
• It is not personal financial or legal advice. This article is general information; for decisions about starting a business, leaving a job or investing, assess your own circumstances with a professional.

Frequently asked questions

Did Elon Musk really publish “3 rules” for courage?
No. The three rules in the old article were a compilation from a magazine column; no such list was found in Musk’s own texts, in company records or in a dated transcript. The refreshed article therefore uses lessons drawn from three events documented in the records.

Who said “Those who dare nothing should not hope for anything”?
Friedrich Schiller. The line appears in Scene 7 of the play Wallensteins Lager: “Wer nichts waget, der darf nichts hoffen.” The speaker is a sergeant trying to persuade a young man to join the army; in other words, within the play the line is part of a persuasion speech.

How common is fear of failure?
According to GEM 2025/2026 data, in 27 of 48 economies between four and five in ten of those who see good opportunities say fear would stop them from starting a business. In 14 economies the share exceeds half; the share of economies in this position rose from 16% in 2019 to 29% in 2025.

Does failure really teach?
Conditionally, yes. In the study by Wang and colleagues, early-career researchers who narrowly missed funding published higher-impact papers as long as they stayed in the system, but some of them left the system entirely. Yin and colleagues also show that those who eventually succeed build each attempt on the previous one, while those who do not make disjoint attempts.

What is the difference between calculated risk and recklessness?
In calculated risk, the loss ceiling, the way back, the learning goal, the timeline and the kill criterion are written down before the decision. In recklessness, none of these is defined. The five-question test makes this difference visible as a score.

Can courage be learned?
The data do not give a definitive answer, but they offer a clue: in GEM, adults who exited a business are more inclined to start one again in 47 of the 48 economies. This is a correlation; still, it suggests that building experience through small, reversible attempts turns fear into a concrete cost calculation.

Sources

1. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (2026). GEM 2025/2026 Global Report: From Uncertainty to Opportunity. Chapter 3 and Appendix Table A2. London: GEM.
2. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (2026). GEM 2025/2026 Global Report landing page and press release dated 26 February 2026.
3. Tesla Motors, Inc. (2010). Form 424B4 IPO prospectus, dated 28 June 2010. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), EDGAR.
4. NASA (2014). Commercial Orbital Transportation Services: A New Era in Spaceflight (NASA/SP-2014-617). Johnson Space Center.
5. Government of South Australia, Premier Jay Weatherill (2017). Tesla to pair world’s largest lithium ion battery with Neoen wind farm in SA. News release, 7 July 2017 (copy published by Neoen).
6. Neoen Australia. Hornsdale Power Reserve project page, overview section (accessed 19 October 2026).
7. Australian Energy Market Operator (2018). Initial operation of the Hornsdale Power Reserve Battery Energy Storage System. April 2018.
8. Levitt, S. D. (2016). Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness. NBER Working Paper 22487. Published version: The Review of Economic Studies, 88(1), 378-405 (2021); the text opened is the working paper.
9. Wang, Y., Jones, B. F. and Wang, D. (2019). Early-career setback and future career impact. Nature Communications, 10, 4331.
10. Yin, Y., Wang, Y., Evans, J. A. and Wang, D. (2019). Quantifying dynamics of failure across science, startups, and security. Nature, DOI 10.1038/s41586-019-1725-y. Text opened: arXiv:1903.07562 v1 preprint.
11. Schiller, F. Wallensteins Lager, 7. Auftritt (original German text). Project Gutenberg eBook no. 6518.
12. Marcus Aurelius. Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, translated by George Long, Book VIII.47. Project Gutenberg eBook no. 15877.

Note: The “see an opportunity but hold back out of fear” column, the ratio between adults who exited and did not exit a business, and the medians across 48 economies are CEOtudent analyses calculated from GEM 2025/2026 Appendix Table A2 data. The “calculated courage test” and the “four-week courage protocol” are CEOtudent editorial frameworks. The CNN quote, the “ancestors” quote, the “3 simple rules” list, the “failure in at least five industries” count, the “richest person in the world” phrase, the sisu characterization and the “regrets area” term from the old version were removed because they could not be verified in a primary record. The sentence attributed to Marcus Aurelius and the South Australia pledge were corrected, and the statement about Tesla’s founding was rewritten according to the prospectus.

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This content was compiled with the support of AI following in-depth research, then written and prepared for publication by the CEOtudent editorial team.

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