‘These things are always wrong’
When Elon Musk has a new start-up idea, he typically skips a crucial stage of getting the business off the ground: He doesn’t create a business plan.
Over the last two decades, Musk has helped build a slew of successful companies, from PayPal to Tesla and SpaceX — making him the world’s richest person, with a net worth of $258 billion, according to Bloomberg. And he’s done that while going directly against the grain of conventional entrepreneurship wisdom.
Musk admitted to throwing out the idea of developing a written roadmap that typically defines a company’s objectives and goals at the South by Southwest conference in 2018. “I had a business plan way back in the Zip2 days,” he said. “But these things are always wrong, so I just didn’t bother with business plans after that.”
Zip2 was Musk’s first major start-up: He co-founded the company, which helped newspapers design city guides, with his brother Kimbal in 1995. It wasn’t exactly…