Elon Musk is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, but he doesn’t seem to be a fan of the most prominent professional degree to learn how to tun a business—the MBA.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Musk offered a sharp critique of corporate America’s leadership priorities, targeting what he called the “MBA-ization of America” as a key culprit behind declining product focus. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who himself dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program to pursue entrepreneurship and has no business degree, didn’t mince words when asked whether American companies prioritize innovation enough. His answer reveals a fundamental philosophy that has guided his own approach to building some of the world’s most valuable companies.
When pressed on whether CEOs in corporate America focus enough on product improvement, Musk was direct: “I think the answer is no.” He then laid out his prescription for better leadership: “My recommendation would really be spend less time on finance, spend less time in conference rooms, less time on PowerPoint, and more time just trying to make your product as amazing as possible.”
But it was his diagnosis of the root cause that drew the most attention. “I think there might be too many MBAs running companies,” Musk said. “There’s the MBA-ization of America, which I think is maybe not that great. There should be more focus on the product, the service itself. Less time on board meetings, less time on financials. The financials come as a result.”
Musk went further, articulating a first-principles view of what companies actually exist to do: “What’s the point of a company at all and why even have companies? A company is an assembly of people gathered together to create a product or service and deliver that product or service. And sometimes people lose sight of that. A company has no value in and of itself. It only has value to the degree that it is an effective allocator of resources to create goods and services that are of greater value than the cost of the inputs.”
He concluded with a redefinition of profit itself: “This thing we call profit just should just mean over time that the value of the output is worth more than the inputs.”
Musk’s critique touches on a long-standing debate in business circles about the relationship between financial engineering and actual value creation. His comments come at a time when several high-profile companies have struggled despite having leadership teams stacked with MBA credentials from top institutions. The emphasis on quarterly earnings, shareholder returns, and financial metrics—core components of MBA curricula—has been blamed by some observers for short-term thinking at the expense of long-term innovation and product excellence.
The irony isn’t lost on industry watchers: companies like Apple under Steve Jobs, Amazon under Jeff Bezos, and Musk’s own ventures have often been led by founders with engineering or technical backgrounds rather than traditional business training. These leaders built their reputations on product obsession and customer focus rather than financial optimization. Meanwhile, several once-dominant American manufacturers and tech companies have seen their competitive positions erode under MBA-heavy management teams that prioritized cost-cutting and financial engineering over R&D and product development.
Musk’s perspective also reflects a broader trend of tech entrepreneurs questioning traditional corporate management structures. The rise of founder-led companies that resist conventional business wisdom—from Tesla’s refusal to spend on advertising to SpaceX’s vertical integration strategy—suggests that the MBA playbook may not be the only path to building successful enterprises. Whether this represents a temporary backlash or a fundamental shift in how America thinks about business leadership remains to be seen, but Musk’s blunt assessment has certainly struck a chord in an era when many are questioning whether American innovation has lost its edge.