Love him or hate him, Elon Musk is one of the strangest teachers alive. His life looks like chaos wrapped in genius which is somehow also a daily reminder that brilliance and madness sometimes share the same office.

He is controversial. Yes.

His decisions are not always met with rousing applause, true.

Yet beneath his controversies are a few lessons most of us could use, even if we never plan to buy a rocket, or rename Twitter.

Here are five weird but worthwhile lessons to learn from him.

1. What’s the use of “f***-you money” if you can’t say “f*** you”?

The phrase “f***-you money” has floated around Wall Street for decades and it means the kind of wealth that frees you from having to please anyone. And Musk might be the first billionaire who actually lives by it. When advertisers pulled out of X (formerly Twitter) over his views, Musk in his usual manner snapped:

“If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f*** yourself.”

Elon Musk, New York Times DealBook Summit 2023

He’s backed politicians like Donald Trump, then publicly clashed with them when he disagreed not because it’s strategic, but because he can.

The lesson: Leverage isn’t power until you use it. Whether it’s money, influence, skill, or freedom of time, the point of independence isn’t just to say you have it; it’s to live by it.

2. Stop staring at the scoreboard

Forbes keeps trying to rank the richest people on earth. Musk keeps pretending not to care. His net worth rises and falls by billions, yet he rarely comments on the list. When Tesla’s shares crashed, he told employees to hold tight and not panic because he was confident the value would climb again.

The lesson: Obsessing over metrics makes you a spectator of your own life. Success that depends on constant external validation: likes, rankings, and approval will always feel fragile. Do the work, believe in your trajectory, and let the scoreboard update itself.

3. Take universal problems personally

This might be Musk’s strangest strength. He comments on and adopts humanity’s challenges.

He worries that civilisation will collapse from low birth rates, so he’s fathered more children than most small towns.

He fears extinction on one planet, so he builds rockets to colonise another.

He’s even launched projects like xAI and Grokipedia to preserve and democratise human knowledge, hoping to someday store it beyond Earth.

The lesson: When you make a global problem personal, your motivation becomes unstoppable. Most people wait for institutions to fix things. Musk’s weirdness lies in asking, “Why not me?”

4. Use absurdity as a strategy

Space travel. Neural implants. Underground city tunnels. Colonising Mars. Electric trucks shaped like geometry homework. Half the time Musk sounds like a 12-year-old pitching sci-fi ideas until he actually builds them.

The lesson: Absurdity has power. Thinking beyond what’s “reasonable” is how boundaries move. Most innovation begins with a question that sounds ridiculous. If your dream doesn’t make someone laugh, it’s probably too small.

5. Fail loudly and keep building

Musk has missed deadlines, launched exploding rockets, and made promises that Twitter/X never fulfilled. But instead of hiding, he doubles down, learns in public, and builds again.

The lesson: Failure isn’t fatal, silence is. The people who grow fastest aren’t those who avoid mistakes but those who recover visibly. Progress requires public imperfection.

Final thought

You don’t have to agree with Elon Musk, most people don’t. But you can’t deny that he plays the game of life at full volume. His weirdness teaches a simple truth: freedom, focus, purpose, imagination, and resilience are messy in practice but priceless in effect.

So maybe the next time someone calls your dream “crazy,” take it as a compliment. You might just be on the Musk frequency.