INTERVIEW | Make Money by Thinking Differently: Inside the Curious Mind of Elon Musk with Charles Steel

Charles Steel spent two decades at top-tier firms like Goldman Sachs, The Carlyle Group, and Ares Management, working closely with management teams to build companies and deploy capital at scale. He later advised Tony Blair in Jerusalem, chaired Save the Children UK, and most recently authored The Curious Mind of Elon Musk: Nine Ways He Thinks Differently, where he dissects how the world’s most driven entrepreneur approaches risk, purpose, and problem-solving. Across finance, policy, and philanthropy, Charles brings a rare, multi-angle perspective on how big money and big ideas actually get made.

On this episode we talk about:

• How a hectic teenage restaurant job taught Charles camaraderie, stoicism, and the confidence that “we’ll figure it out and get paid by the end of the day.”

• The path from a middle-class upbringing and studying history at Cambridge to landing at Goldman Sachs and learning what true excellence looks like.

• Why he wishes he’d fed his curiosity more at university—and how he’s become a student again later in life.

• The workload and culture at elite investment banks in the late ’90s, and the tradeoffs of chasing excellence at 80–100 hour weeks.

• How curiosity pulled him from private equity into advising Tony Blair in the Middle East and chairing Save the Children UK.

• Why Elon Musk is so hard to categorize and the three “ingredients” Charles believes truly explain him: existential anxiety, hyper-rational engineering, and unusual creativity.

• How Musk reframes risk, probability, and failure—and what regular entrepreneurs can learn from that mindset.

• Why embracing your “strangeness,” feeding your curiosity, and doing intricate, carefully made work can be a powerful (and profitable) life strategy.

Top 3 Takeaways

1. Curiosity is not just about asking questions; it’s about caring enough to explore deeply, cross disciplines, and stick with difficult, intricate work long enough to make something truly valuable.

2. Elon Musk’s advantage isn’t just IQ or work ethic—it’s the way he reframes risk, failure, and the future as a range of possible outcomes he can influence by backing himself and acting boldly.

3. You don’t need to copy Musk to benefit from his thinking; you can apply the same principles by betting on yourself, embracing hard problems, and leaning into what makes you different instead of trying to be “normal.”

Notable Quotes

• “At Goldman Sachs, I learned what excellence really was.”

• “I wanted to understand what really drove him—what drives the most driven person in the world.”

• “Don’t worry so much about being normal. Embrace your differentness.”

Connect with Charles Steel:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-steel-3804397b/

• Twitter/X: https://x.com/crasteel

• Other: Website – https://charlessteel.com (links to his book The Curious Mind of Elon Musk: Nine Ways He Thinks Differently and other work)

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