Tesla Founder Elon Musk admits judging books by their cover

Founder of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday that he judges books by their covers. He later clarified that he does not mean the metaphor, but actual books.

Tesla Founder Elon Musk admits judging books by their cover

Friday February 26, 2021,

2 min Read

'Don't judge a book by its cover.'


This age-old English idiom is a metaphorical phase, which implies that one should not judge another's worth by their outer appearances. But on Thrusday, TeslaFounder and CEO Elon Musk took to microblogging site Twitter to admit that he thinks otherwise.

Founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk tweeted, "I admit to judging books by their cover."

However, almost an hour later, the business magnate clarified and commented that he meant the actual book, and not a 'meta4' (metaphor).

Computer Scientist and co-founder of Y Combinator, Paul Graham, responded to Elon Musk's tweet saying he agrees with him. "It works to judge books by their covers. The maxim "you can't judge a book by its cover" dates from the time before publishers designed distinctive covers for each book. Now covers give you plenty of clues," Paul Graham explained.

Internet personality Félix Lengyel, popularly known by his internet name xQc, backed Elon Musk and tweeted that there should be no reason for writing a great book without designing a great cover.

Chief Digital Evangelist for Salesforce Vala Afshar took the opportunity and responded to Elon Musk saying that there are book stores that have books wrapped in paper with a short description, so that no one judges a book by its cover.

The tweet generated both criticism and memes. A Twitter user commented saying he judges Musk by all his son's names.


Tweets by Elon Musk have always created a buzz globally, often affecting businesses in ways, both good and bad. Earlier, Musk's tweets on cryptocurrencies affected the value of cryptocurrency Dogecoin in a big way. Similarly, invite-only social audio app Clubhouse gained momentum after Elon Musk appeared on the app.


Prior to that, while WhatsApp was making headlines for its privacy-related issues, Elon Musk had tweeted "Use Signal," a WhatsApp alternative, which was limited to techies and privacy-conscious early adopters. Soon after the tweet, Signal's downloads sky-rocketed and grew 62-fold.


Edited by Megha Reddy