Etiquette guides are unlikely to cite Elon Musk. According to Kevin O’Leary, if you bore him, he may just leave. Mid-sentence, apparently.
O’Leary, the “Shark Tank” star, described Musk in a video posted on X in 2025 as someone who runs on “100% signal” with almost no tolerance for distraction. “One other guy that is 100% signal and I’ve never met anybody like him is Elon Musk,” he said.
The detail that matters is the filter. O’Leary says Musk applies a strict one to how he spends his time, and a conversation that is neither useful nor urgent nor moving an idea along gets short shrift. O’Leary’s point, as ever with him, was less about manners than momentum.
He has a vocabulary for it. Signal is work that pushes a company forward; noise is what eats the hours without changing much. In the post that accompanied the video he put the consequence bluntly: “Waste time on distractions, and you lose.”
Jobs had some noise
O’Leary has also compared Musk with Steve Jobs, the late Apple co-founder, from his own time running The Learning Company. Jobs was fiercely focused, O’Leary has said, but still had some noise in his day. Musk does not.
Whether that is admirable or exhausting depends on where you sit. Musk’s portfolio includes Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI and The Boring Company, which is a lot of calendar. O’Leary called the focus “a lightning bolt in a bottle.” He was careful to say it is not a universal playbook: most people, he suggested, cannot and should not turn every chat into a 30-second productivity test.
