Elon Musk Says He Owes His Success to a 3-Step Problem-Solving Trick Used by Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla

By the age of 46, Elon Musk has innovated and built three revolutionary multibillion-dollar companies in different fields — Paypal (financial services), Tesla (automotive), and SpaceX (aerospace).

This list doesn’t include Solar City (energy), which he helped build and acquired for $2.6 billion.

At first glance, it’s easy to link his rapid success, ability to solve unsolvable problems, and genius-level creativity to his incredible work ethic.

Musk himself said that he worked 100 hours a week for over 15 years and recently scaled down to 85 hours. Rumor also has it that he doesn’t even take lunch breaks, multitasking between eating, meetings, and responding to emails all at the same time.