A decade before Elon Musk became one of the most powerful men in the world — before Tesla hit trillion-dollar status, before SpaceX conquered the skies, and long before he rebranded Twitter into X — his ex-wife Justine Musk gave the internet one of its most unfiltered, unforgettable reality checks.
It all started on Quora, when a user asked a deceptively simple question: “Will I become a billionaire if I’m determined and willing to do the work?”
Instead of coddling the dream, Justine — who had seen the rise of Musk up close — replied with one word: “No.”
But her response wasn’t meant to crush ambition. It was meant to wake people up.
“Determination and hard work are necessary, yes, but they are the minimum requirements,” she wrote.
Then came the line that would echo across the internet:
“You haven’t been racing naked through shark-infested waters yet.”
That one sentence summed up what few people dare to admit — that success at Musk’s level isn’t just about effort. It’s about obsession, genius, risk, and a tolerance for pain that most people can’t stomach.
According to Justine, true wealth doesn’t come from simply wanting money — it comes from being so uniquely irreplaceable that the world needs what you create. She advised mastering two wildly different fields — like engineering and storytelling, or science and design — then combining them into something revolutionary.
“You must make your skills have idea sex and produce idea babies,” she wrote, in what became one of Quora’s most-quoted lines ever.
Her post went viral, drawing over a million views and more than 23,000 upvotes. Many praised her for her brutal honesty; others called her cynical. But in hindsight, her words read like prophecy — a glimpse into the kind of unrelenting mentality that drives people like her ex-husband to reshape industries.
For context, Justine and Elon met at Queen’s University in Canada in the 1990s. They married young, endured tragedy with the loss of their first child, then had five more together before divorcing in 2008. In a 2010 essay for Marie Claire, she revealed that Musk once told her on their wedding day:
“I am the alpha in this relationship.”
It was a declaration that reflected both the intensity — and imbalance — that often surrounded his ambition.
Today, Justine Musk is an author, best known for her dark fantasy novels BloodAngel and Lord of Bones. She’s largely stepped back from public life but occasionally resurfaces in discussions about power, gender, and creativity. She has also spoken against the “alpha male” myth, calling it “largely bullsh*t,” and argued that patriarchy hurts men as much as women.
So, can you become a billionaire if you’re “determined and willing to do the work”?
Justine’s answer remains one of the most honest in internet history:
Only if you’re willing to bleed for your vision, reinvent yourself endlessly — and maybe, just maybe, swim naked through shark-infested waters.