We prove strong and explicit diameter bounds for finite simple Lie algebras, which parallel Babai's conjecture for finite simple groups. Specifically, we show that any nonabelian finite simple Lie algebra $\mathfrak{g}$ over $\mathbf{F}_p$ has diameter $O((\log |\mathfrak{g}|)^D)$ for $D \approx 3.11$ with respect to any generating set. For absolutely simple classical Lie algebras over $\mathbf{F}_p$, we establish the sharper bound $O(\log |\mathfrak{g}|)$ when the Lie type is fixed and the generators are chosen uniformly at random.