Elon Musk illustrates how this process works in practice in an interview on the Foundation podcast: First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world. . . . You kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “What are we sure is true?” . . . and then reason up from there. . . . Somebody could say . . . “Battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be. . . . Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt-hour, and so it’s not going to be much better than that in the future.” . . .
