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“He’s a person who’s all over the map, and you don’t know what he’s going to say or do. And then, all of a sudden, he pulls it all together.”
“We are too conservative. We are a ninety-five-year-old company. We have to change. We have to use some of Elon’s thinking.”
Human civilization, he felt, will soon strain the resources of our small planet. That will confront us with a choice: accept static growth or expand to places beyond Earth. “I don’t think stasis is compatible with liberty,” he says. “We can fix that problem in exactly one way: by moving out into the solar system.”
Bezos recalls feeling that Musk was a bit too sure of himself, given that he had not yet successfully launched a rocket.
Reusable rockets could someday get the cost of taking a person to Mars down to $500,000. Most people would not make the trip, he conceded, “but I suspect there are people in this room who would.”
But Musk was furious. The ability to send a payload into orbit put the SpaceX rocket, he believed, in a different league.
“AI alignment.” It aims to make sure that AI systems are aligned with human goals and values,
They should be an extension of the will of individuals, rather than systems that could go rogue and develop their own goals and
Musk insisted that the system should be judged not on whether it prevented accidents but instead on whether it led to fewer accidents. It was a logical stance, but it ignored the emotional reality that a person killed by an Autopilot system would provoke a lot more horror than a hundred deaths caused by driver error.
“Risk is a type of fuel.”
He never put much effort into sales and marketing, and instead believed that if you made a great product, the sales would follow.
How can we move faster? What are the impediments? “He spent a lot of time giving us lessons about the importance of deleting steps and simplifying,”
Like many techies, he was liberal on social issues but with a dollop of libertarian resistance to regulations and political correctness.
Her playfulness, however, was accompanied by the type of turmoil that attracted Musk. His brother and friends hated her with a passion that made their distaste for Justine pale. “She was just so toxic,” Kimbal says. “A nightmare.” Musk’s chief of staff Sam Teller compares her to a comic-book villain. “She was like the Joker in Batman,” he says. “She didn’t have a goal or aim other than chaos. She thrives on destabilizing everything.”
found him lying on the floor of the conference room with the lights off. McNeill went over and lay down next to him in the corner. “Hey, pal,” McNeill said. “We’ve got an earnings call to do.”
But his talk soon took on an eerie tone. Even those in the audience could tell that, despite his attempt to look joyful, he was in a very dark place. Instead of celebrating, he warned about tough times ahead. “The major challenge for us over the next six to nine months is how do we build a huge number of cars,” he said haltingly. “Frankly we’re going to be in production hell.”
It was a tactic—personally surging into the breach 24/7 with an all-hands-on-deck cadre of fellow fanatics—that came to define the maniacal intensity that he demanded at his companies.
“Step one should be to question the requirements,” he
“Gage’s story was fairly typical of his behavior where he just couldn’t really process his frustration in a productive way.”
Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts—before you introduce automation.
They felt that Musk was compromising safety and quality in order to rush production. The senior director for production quality left. A group of current and former employees told CNBC that they were “pressured to take shortcuts to hit aggressive Model 3 production goals.”
“If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible,” Musk told him, “then unconventional thinking is necessary.”
1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough. 3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist. 4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. 5. Automate. That comes last. The
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Comradery is dangerous. It makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work. There is a tendency to not want to throw a colleague under the bus. That needs to be avoided.
It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong.
When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.
“Elon Musk Details ‘Excruciating’ Personal Toll of Tesla Turmoil,” the headline read. The story reported how he had choked up during the interview. “Mr. Musk alternated between laughter and tears,”
design, he held one very otherworldly meeting called “Mars Colonizer.” There he imagined what a Mars colony would look like and how it should be governed.
aspirational mission with a practical business plan.
The plan was to send satellites into low-Earth orbit, about 340 miles high, so that the latency of the signals would not be as bad as systems that depended on geosynchronous satellites, which orbit 22,000 miles above the Earth.
From their low altitude, Starlink’s beams cannot cover nearly as much ground, so many more are needed. Starlink’s goal was to eventually create a megaconstellation of forty thousand satellites.
he speaks in a rapid scattershot of exclamations studded with “you know” and “like” and “wow, dude.”
“I could have made a lot of money, but I could not have made life multiplanetary,” he
Musk’s instincts said otherwise. “Run the numbers,” he told the team. “Run the numbers.” When they did so, they determined that steel could, in fact, turn out to be lighter in the conditions that Starship would face. At very cold temperatures, the strength of stainless steel increases by 50 percent, which meant it would be stronger when holding the supercooled liquid oxygen fuel. In addition, the high melting point of stainless steel would eliminate the need for a heat shield on Starship’s space-facing side, reducing the overall weight of the rocket.
There was a lot of interaction, but not a lot of cuddling.
In 2020, SpaceX changed that. That May, a Falcon 9 rocket topped with a Crew Dragon capsule was ready to carry two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station—the first-ever launch of humans into orbit by a private company.
innovation was driven by setting clear metrics, such as cost per ton lifted into orbit or average number of miles driven on Autopilot without human intervention.
“space,” which is defined by NASA as beginning at fifty miles
above Earth but by other nations as what is known as the Kármán line, at sixty-two miles up. Bezos’s mission nine days later
Musk sent out an email titled “Starship Surge” to all SpaceX employees. “Anyone who is not working on other obviously critical path projects at SpaceX should shift immediately to work on the first Starship orbit,” he wrote. “Please fly, drive, or get here by any means possible.”
had deployed what he called the “idiot index.” That was the ratio of the total cost of a component to the cost of its raw materials. Something with a high idiot index—say, a component that cost $1,000 when the aluminum that composed it cost only $100—was likely to have a design that was too complex or a manufacturing process that was too inefficient. As Musk put it, “If the ratio is high, you’re an idiot.”
“You better be fucking sure in the future you know these things off the top of your head,” Musk said. “If you ever come into a meeting and do not know what are the idiot parts, then your resignation will be accepted immediately.”
give people hardcore feedback, mostly accurate, and I try not to do it in a way that’s ad hominem,” he says. “I try to criticize the action, not the person. We all make mistakes. What matters is whether a person has a good feedback loop, can seek criticism from others, and can improve. Physics does not care about hurt feelings. It cares about whether you got the rocket right.”
As usual during tense moments, Musk diverted his mind by thinking about the future.
“Technology does not automatically progress,” Musk said. “This flight was a great example of how progress requires human agency.”
but it was better to try and fail rather than analyze the issue for months. “If you make this thing fast, you can find out fast. And then you can fix it fast.”
If we don’t end up adding back some parts later, we haven’t deleted enough.”
Please go ultra-hardcore on deletion and simplification.”
“and we should do it so we can guide it in a good direction.”
