Would Elon Musk have built Tesla and founded SpaceX had he remained in South Africa?

Perhaps he would still have become a successful entrepreneur. But would he have built a rocket company capable of competing with established aerospace contractors and fundamentally changing the economics of space travel?

Now consider a question closer to home. Had Anthony Tan never attended Harvard Business School, where he met Tan Hooi Ling, would Grab exist today?

Anthony Tan might have pursued another successful venture but the precise circumstances that produced Grab might never have aligned.

Neither question can be answered definitively. That is precisely what makes them worth asking.

We tend to study the companies that succeed. Far less attention is paid to those that were never founded, not because their potential founders lacked ability but because the necessary circumstances never aligned.

This raises a broader economic question. How much entrepreneurial potential is lost because talent and opportunity never meet?

The conventional account of entrepreneurship celebrates the founder’s vision, persistence and appetite for risk. Yet it often understates the conditions that make exceptional outcomes possible.

A founder needs people capable of developing an idea, customers willing to pay for it, investors prepared to finance it and institutions that allow it to grow.

Musk’s ambition, technical judgement and willingness to commit capital were central to SpaceX’s development. But the company also emerged within an American aerospace ecosystem built over decades, with specialist engineers, established suppliers, research institutions and a government willing to purchase services from private companies.

In 2006, Nasa awarded SpaceX a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services agreement worth up to US$278 million, subject to development milestones. It provided an important institutional pathway for a young company attempting something extraordinarily capital-intensive.

Sure, the environment does not build the company. But it changes the odds that someone can.

Economists have long recognised that innovation is not evenly distributed.

Certain places repeatedly produce successful companies. Silicon Valley is the obvious example but financial centres, university towns and industrial clusters show the same pattern.

Research by economists Aaron Chatterji, Edward Glaeser and William Kerr examines how local conditions shape entrepreneurship. Ideas, skills, capital and professional relationships circulate more readily where relevant participants are concentrated.

Universities illustrate this.

At Harvard Business School, Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling developed the plan for Grab, winning second place and US$25,000 in its 2011 New Venture Competition.

Harvard did not build Grab but it brought two people together, providing the platform to form a productive partnership that might otherwise never have existed.

There is a difficulty in drawing conclusions from these stories. We already know how they end.

Successful entrepreneurs are visible. Those who might have built important businesses but never had the opportunity to try are largely absent from the data.

Alex Bell, Raj Chetty and co-authors traced more than one million American inventors to their childhood circumstances. Children whose parents were in the top 1% of the income distribution were about ten times as likely to become inventors as those from families below the median.

Ability alone does not explain the gap. Even among children with the highest third-grade maths scores, those from wealthier families were far more likely to patent.

The authors estimate that if women, minorities and children from lower-income families invented at the same rate as white men from the top fifth of the income distribution, the number of American inventors would roughly quadruple.

They describe these unrealised innovators as “lost Einsteins”.

Individual capability still matters. Not every Silicon Valley resident or Harvard graduate would build a successful company.

Research by Paul Gompers and co-authors found that repeat founders are more likely to succeed, showing that experience and capability matter.

Exceptional founders can persuade sceptical investors, recruit talented people and enter markets others consider unattractive. But even they operate within constraints.

The question is not whether Musk or Anthony Tan could have succeeded elsewhere. It is whether their particular achievements would have been as likely without the circumstances that helped bring them about.

There is an important difference between saying that an individual could have succeeded somewhere else and assuming that the same outcome would have occurred.

Malaysia has no shortage of ability or commercial ambition.

Its fundamental challenge is whether it can attract and retain ambitious individuals.

The World Bank’s April 2026 Malaysia Economic Monitor highlights the mismatch. More than half of the 1.86 million Malaysians abroad work in skilled and semi-skilled occupations, while foreign workers in Malaysia are primarily low-skilled, making Malaysia a net skills exporter.

Those who stay often cannot use their qualifications. The share of tertiary-educated workers in jobs below their skill level rose from about 30.2% in 2015 to 36.1% in 2024, exceeding 44% among graduates aged 25 to 29.

The findings on inventors are more striking. The share of Malaysian-invented patents owned by Malaysian entities fell from around 62–63% in the early 1990s to below 20% by 2020. The report concludes that while Malaysian inventors possess the capabilities, foreign businesses offer opportunities that domestic firms struggle to match.

Grab offers an uncomfortable example. Founded in Malaysia by two Malaysians, it relocated to Singapore in 2014 for its deeper venture capital ecosystem. Malaysia has since launched initiatives to attract foreign tech talent and strengthen domestic venture financing.

Yet attracting skilled workers is not necessarily the same as attracting entrepreneurs capable of building globally competitive businesses.

Such founders seek exceptional collaborators and competitive ecosystems. Can Kuala Lumpur become a destination where global talent builds companies together, rather than a place local talent leaves?

Governments assess entrepreneurial ecosystems through start-up numbers, venture capital investment, exits and jobs created. These measures reveal much less about potential that remains unrealised.

We will never know whether SpaceX would have existed had Musk remained in South Africa or whether Grab would have emerged without its founders meeting at Harvard.

These counterfactuals remind us that a successful company is rarely the achievement of an individual alone.

And perhaps the greatest economic loss is not the businesses that fail but the businesses that are never founded.

Krystle Chan is a finance professional with experience across investment banking and public markets. Pearl Lee is an investment professional with experience across real estate and private credit.