Elon Musk just cemented his place as the most consequential entrepreneur of our times. Following , he is the world’s first trillionaire. Since the valuation is based on a mere 5% float, the numbers aren’t that important. Musk’s real achievement is the raw, untamed audacity of a vision so gigantic that it boggles the mind. Musk sees a post-scarcity future where the sheer technological muscle of Tesla and SpaceX in robotics, AI, and rocketry will automate all labour, rendering human work obsolete.
In this willingness to take aim for civilisational leaps, Musk is the true inheritor of the tech-prophet throne that has lain vacant since the death of Steve Jobs—another difficult genius who did not win many friends.
Yet, Musk got to where he is by breaking nearly every rule about leadership as taught in business schools like Harvard, Wharton or the Indian Institutes of Management. Lead with empathy: scratch; build consensual internal alignments: scratch. Of course, he also broke the first and most basic rule of all by disregarding the myth that you need to go to a business school to learn how to do business.
Historical data validates this scepticism. A look at the world’s top fifty self-made billionaires reveals a striking absence of management degrees in their CVs. Instead, the list is dominated by university dropouts like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison, or technical visionaries with advanced scientific degrees. Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford computer science PhD candidates, while Nvidia founder Jensen Huang holds a master’s in electrical engineering.
In India too, the world-class generics industry was built by those with specialised degrees. The founders of Bengal Chemicals, Cipla and Lupin had advanced degrees in chemistry and were teachers before setting out on their journeys. Parvinder Singh, who propelled Ranbaxy to global scale, earned his PhD in pharmaceutical sciences. The world-beating IT services industry was also constructed by men with engineering degrees rather than business administration.
In a study of 27 serial entrepreneurs, Saras Sarasvathy, the Paul M. Hammaker Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, presented her theory of effectuation. It reveals a fundamental mismatch between what b-schools teach and what founding a company actually demands. Business schools train students in what Sarasvathy calls “causation” thinking: start with a goal, acquire the resources to reach it, forecast outcomes, minimise risk—a logic built for optimising existing systems. Founders, by contrast, start with whatever is at hand—their skills, networks, even their wives’ jewellery as start-up capital—and let goals emerge from what becomes possible. The MBA may be indispensable once a company exists and needs scaling. But the zero-to-one act of creation calls for a mindset that most business schools neither teach nor reward.
To borrow the words of Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, who famously scrubbed toilets at a reform school before launching his empire from a Denny’s diner booth: greatness is not intelligence; greatness comes from character, and character is not formed out of smart people but out of people who have suffered.
This capacity for calculated suffering is precisely what is missing in India’s contemporary startup ecosystem. Since 1961, when the IIMs were established in Calcutta and Ahmedabad, India has minted some of the sharpest analytical minds in the world. Yet the nation’s greatest generational wealth creators—historical titans like Dhirubhai Ambani and Ratan Tata, as well as modern empire-builders like Mukesh Ambani, Sunil Mittal, Gautam Adani, Dilip Shanghvi and Radhakishan Damani—achieved their scale through raw grit, political navigation, and market intuition.
Not one possessed an MBA.
And yet, an MBA degree has never been more coveted. That’s because an MBA from a top institute is the ultimate de-risking mechanism, guaranteeing a life without financial struggle.
B-School curricula reflect this. A majority of the cases used for teaching are focused on managerial decision-making in existing entities rather than on setting up new enterprises. As a result, India’s sharpest business minds are systematically funnelled into becoming highly-paid executives who manage operations of global multinationals.
The rise of Elon Musk reminds us that breakthrough innovation requires seemingly irrational, high-stakes gambles that are missing from management textbooks. Until India’s ecosystem learns to culturally decouple prestige from corporate titles, and until our brightest minds choose the messy path of the builder over the comfortable seat of the executive, we will continue to produce world-class managers while watching technical visionaries elsewhere build the future.
In Company Outsider, Sundeep Khanna distills more than three decades of his experience writing on India Inc. into a thousand words of context and insights that few can bring to the table. Want this newsletter delivered in your inbox? .