German start-ups are looking to Elon Musk

Starting a business

Sep 30, 2024

By Stefan Asche

Reading time: approx. 2 minutes

Tesla founder Elon Musk is more of a role model to his founders than Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. Results of a Bitkom investigation.

According to a report by the digital association Bitkom, every third start-up in Germany has an entrepreneurial role model. Tesla, X.com and SpaceX boss Elon Musk (20%) is mentioned most frequently. He is followed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates (9%) as well as Apple founder Steve Jobs and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (4% each).

Celonis is recognized in a similar way to Apple

When asked about the most successful start-up, the young AI company OpenAI is way ahead with 21% of the mentions. This is followed by Amazon and Space-X (10% each). Astonishing: The German software start-up Celonis is on a par with Apple (6% each). The Munich-based company is developing software that makes it possible to carry out so-called process mining. Business processes are digitally mapped and analyzed with regard to hidden process knowledge.

Every tenth start-up expects imminent bankruptcy

Germany’s weak economic situation worries 11% of start-ups. They even expect bankruptcy in the next twelve months. And 45% of founders report that the situation for start-ups has deteriorated over the past two years.

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