Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.

“It’s not how well you avoid problems,” Mueller says. “It’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.”

It was an example of Musk’s policy that the designers sketching the shape of the car should work hand in glove with the engineers who were determining how the car would be built. “At other places I worked,” von Holzhausen says, “there was this throw-it-over-the-fence mentality, where a designer would have an idea and then send it to an engineer, who sat in a different building or in a different country.” Musk put the engineers and designers in the same room. “The vision was that we would create designers who thought like engineers and engineers who thought like designers,” von Holzhausen says.

When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.