I'm an independent consultant, and I have slightly more nuanced version of this. First: all of us, Musk included, work for someone. In Musk's case, he is working for his shareholders. There are two distinct, but correlated values you need to consider with work. First, is the value that your work creates for other people. This is captured by the price you charge for that work. The work could be direct labor (as in being an employee,) or it could be the labor that goes into a product sold to a customer (this would make you an entrepreneur.) The second is the part of that value you are able to capture for yourself. The higher the proportion, the greater your benefit. But remember you really care about the absolute compensation you get, not the proportion of the value create. You can be a small cog in the machine at Tesla and make $500K a year or you can be an entrepreneur and capture 40% of your revenue as after tax profit for yourself and make $150K. There is surely some hedonic value in being independent, so depending on how much you value your freedom, that $150k might well be worth $300K to you. In which case, you would be indifferent to either working for Musk or for yourself. Of course a proper calculation, would take into account growth prospects at both Tesla and your own business. I made this calculation before leaving Microsoft, and preferred to take my chances as independent consultant even though the initial income was less than a 10th of what I made at Microsoft. But eventually my income turned out to be 3x greater than I would have earned at MSFT over the same period, so the trade-off was a good one. But remember, this only because I was a low levels employee at Microsoft. My prospects at Microsoft were not good enough to get me to a CVP position or better in any reasonable timeframe. For a person with a realistic prospect of making VP or better at a FAANG, the calculation is considerably more in favour of remaining an employee. In both situations it makes sense to work as hard as possible to maximise the likelihood of a positive outcome for you. So work as hard as you can in the direction that is most likely to give you the greatest benefit.