The 2018 documentary Elon Musk: The Real Life Iron Man, businessman Elon Musk, who is known for leading companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter), paid homage to key individuals who helped him on his professional journey. These included fellow business leaders and other scientific visionaries, who provided important advice at various stages on what to do next.
But he’s not alone. Other business leaders like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerburg have also had mentors to lean on at different stages of their own careers. Even Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has previously mentioned the importance of mentoring in his early career as a public servant.
Learn more about their mentors, and what lessons you can learn from them when it comes to relying on career advice.
Elon Musk
Mentors can inspire with you with ideas. In 2004, Elon met an engineer named Martin Eberhard, who launched a startup called Tesla Motors, and the two mutually inspired each other to create high-end electric vehicles, while the rest of the car market was still focused on combustion vehicles.
Eberhard focused on engineering and design, while Elon worked on product development and strategic decisions.
Sometimes, mentors can both be peers, and acquaintances-turned-friends who provide professional help.
At a later stage of Elon’s career, he also leaned on the help and advice of Larry Ellison, the chief technology officer of Oracle. He previously said: “ Larry Ellison is very smart. I will say Larry Ellison is one of the smartest people.”
Larry committed US$1 billion to Elon’s acquisition of X, while serving on the Tesla board from 2018 to 2022. Furthermore, he also reportedly assisted in obtaining expensive Nvidia processor chips in Elon’s attempts to develop artificial intelligence.
Bill Gates
If you haven’t heard, the billionaire, who made his fortune with computing company Microsoft, was in Singapore in mid-2025 to establish its presence, with the support of Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB).
While his career is now at a different stage where he enjoys pursuits like philanthropy, part of this drive for change can be attributed to famed investor Warren Buffet.
Bill has publicly credited Warren for teaching him how to keep a long-term goal in mind, as well as an example of someone who simplifies complex concepts for the laymen to understand issues better. These are key skills that have served him well even today.
Jeff Bezos
Sometimes, mentors can be someone you’ve looked up to for a long time.
For Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, he too cited Warren Buffet as a long-time inspiration since his early 20s, and Jeff admits he “loves to read anything (Warren) writes”.
Mentors can also be picked for their skills. Jeff shared during a panel discussion at the Forum on Leadership 2018 by the George W Bush Presidential Center that he looks up to Disney’s CEO Bob Iger, and JPMorgan Chase chairman Jamie Dimon.
He said Bob’s quick wit and ability to fulfil long-term goals was something he admired, while Jamie was a “terrific executive” at a “very complicated company”.
Lawrence Wong
Even Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has previously admitted career mentoring has made a difference to him.
At the 2022 launch of Mentoring SG, a platform connecting younger workers with mentors and mentoring opportunities, he shared as the then-Deputy Prime Minister: “When I started out as an economist in the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI), I had very good bosses.”
“They engaged me; they were my happenstance. We did not have a structured, guided mentoring programme, but they were good bosses. And they were there to talk to me, gave me opportunities to do more at work and encouraged me to see the purpose in public service work.”
“And it was through these exposures, and from continuing in the job over time, that I subsequently found my calling in the public sector, and I stayed on for more than 25 years now – 15 years in the civil service and 10 years in politics.”
He added: “There will be moments when we stumble. But it is from these setbacks that we grow, and mentors play a pivotal role in guiding us through these setbacks and enabling us to develop and grow.”
What do mentors get in return?
Interestingly enough, Larry Ellison, the peer-mentor for Elon Musk, was also known to be an investor and peer-mentor to Apple’s previous CEO Steve Jobs!
In a biographic on Elon Musk, he said of both: “OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) is one of the reasons for their success, because they obsessed on solving a problem until they did.”
“What set them apart is that Musk, unlike Jobs, applied that obsession not just to product design but also to the underlying science, engineering, and manufacturing.”
The benefit of mentoring and working with them both, apart from growing his investments with their companies, was also how they inspired him to grow his own company, Oracle.
He watched Steve create a whole new paradigm for computing with Apple by making products that showed the value of blending hardware and software with good design. That brought Larry to acquire Sun Microsystems in 2009, and improve his company’s database performance by designing hardware and software better.
When it comes to Elon, Larry learned to stop viewing commercial and business ecosystem solutions separately.
For example, Elon’s businesses SpaceX and Tesla are both focused on merging big picture challenges. This included the challenge of getting humankind off our planet, or getting the whole car industry to shift to electric engines with commercial benefit, as well as partnering with whoever can make these objectives happen, rather than focusing on being a sole manufacturer.
Larry did the same with Oracle by leading the way to open cloud interoperability through working with Microsoft, inspiring the rest of the marketplace to make cloud computing more open.
Clearly, mentorship is win-win when applied correctly. Perhaps it’s time to consider who you can be mentored by, and who you too can mentor!
