What can we learn from Elon?

  • Be insanely ambitious
    • The most ambitious visions — grand missions for humanity — attract the most talented and driven people
    • Not only accept risk as a necessary component of ambition and something to be mitigated, but maximize it. Put all your chips on the table again, and again: self-fund SpaceX from PayPal exit money, use all remaining funds on a last launch attempt after 3 failed launches during 2008 crisis, self-fund Tesla on personal loans during 2008 to keep it afloat, start Starship risking bankrupting SpaceX just when Falcon 9 was finally commercially successful, go all in on Trump, etc.
    • Peter Thiel: Maybe Elon understands something about risk that nobody else does?
    • My take: Willingness to take the most risk = Ability to tackle the most ambitious visions with almost no competition
  • But always pragmatic
    • Always backtrack to a practical sustainable business: start with upscale Roadster and Model S for Tesla, Starlink for SpaceX, medical applications for disabled people for Neuralink, etc.
    • Blind idealism without grounding in reality gets nothing done
    • Every business he started was very capital efficient
  • Cultivate a maniacal sense of urgency
    • Regularly rally the team around quasi impossible objectives: Tesla model 3 “production hell” to ramp up to 5000 units per week, Optimus robot launch, self-driving launch, etc.
    • Lead by example: be on the ground with the team working harder than anyone: sleeping in factory and touring lines every day for Tesla, in the jungle next to the launch pad for Starship, etc.
    • This is the most effective way to combat inertia:
      • Motivates everyone by showing them how much they can accomplish
      • Builds team cohesion in adversity
      • Prunes low intensity team members
    • On the flip side, great people sometimes burn out and leave. But they also often look back thinking it was the best work of their life
    • Pretty similar to Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field
  • Simplify / delete requirements
    • The only true requirements are dictated by the laws of physics
    • Always attach a person’s name to any requirement
    • Delete requirements to the brink of viability - if you don’t add back 10%, you probably didn’t delete enough: stainless steel Starship, Tesla manufacturing lines, Neuralink as a single device, Twitter staff cuts, etc
  • Master engineering fundamentals, always dive in the details
    • Time and time again, Elon drives major engineering decisions himself, applying his algorithm to delete requirements: pushing for reusable rockets, stainless steel Starship, vertically integrating Tesla manufacturing, simplifying every detail of the Model 3 production lines, etc.
    • Will personally micro-debug with engineers on the ground
    • Echoes Jobs’s obsession with details
  • Personally unblock the bottleneck
    • The job is to jump onto whatever is the biggest bottleneck today
    • Collapse layers when needed, work directly with engineers
    • When no fire is burning, run deep engineering reviews to learn the people and the details
  • Set a single north-star metric
    • SpaceX: dollars per kilogram to orbit
    • Tesla: deliveries per week
    • The right clear objective focuses every trade-off and cultivates urgency
  • Don’t optimize for being liked (via Charly)
    • Most leaders, knowingly or not, optimize for likability
    • Optimize for truth and outcomes instead