Elon Musk Is All About the Nonstop Grind. And He Can’t Stop Talking About It
wsj.com
wsj.com
Why grind when you've got like a quarter trillion dollars?
Honestly, it's folks like him that really need to realize that life isn't just about "work" - it's about spending time with the folks around you who you care about the most. Well, maybe he's actually doing just that because his shareholders care about him, and he clearly doesn't give much attention to his families (he's got like 10 kids with 3 or 4 different women and has had numerous affairs between/during each of his marriages).
It's OK to grind, it's OK to work hard, it's OK to work long hours....if your heart is in it and you're not responsible for anything else. If you've got that sort of money, you need to realize that you've won already, and your intellect would be better suited to fixing the world's toughest problems rather than making wealthy people wealthier through stock appreciation.
He'd be off giving massive donations to every major STEM program in the country and letting the engineers do engineering work. Instead, he bought a social media platform and spends his time (illegally) firing people who don't want to "grind" and sharing stupid memes and dumb ideas as if he's a 14-year-old edgelord discovering internet anonymity for the first time.
Similarly, he wanted to run Twitter since that would let him singlehandedly control what literally everybody is talking about. He quickly discovered that he can't actually do that without killing it, so he's turning it over to somebody else.
He doesn't want to be Bill Gates, who really is doing something closer to what you suggest. He wants to be Christopher Columbus crossed with Julius Caesar.
That's why he grinds. He wants to be the most important person in the world -- and to remain so for centuries after he's dead. I suppose that's understandable, even though I find it repugnant.