Elon Musk

✅ Elon was shaped by adversity being constantly bullied during childhood. ✅ Elon built rockets by moving fast and seeing why it broke, then improving on the next one. Basically trial and error, and it worked. He would move fast on something and if it failed, learn quickly and try again. ✅ Everyone told him he couldn't make 5,000 cars in a month, but he did anyway. ✅ Musk believed a small team of high-quality people works better than a big group of mediocre people, which is a big reason behind why he fired 90% of Twitter. ✅ When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks. ✅ "But what a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world." Adversity can shape your tolerance for pain. Elon’s childhood was brutal, bullied constantly, and it marked him. Sometimes environments are chaos training. At a "Lord of the Flies-esque" summer camp, kids fought for food, and someone died. He witnessed death. If the voice closest to you says you’re worthless, escaping becomes strategy. His dad would constantly beat him and tell him he’s worthless. He had a really hard childhood. Moving in with the wrong person can be a life lesson you only understand later. Elon decided to move in with his father and now realizes that was a mistake. Selective effort is a tell. He only did good in subjects he thought were important and didn’t try in the other subjects. Input matters. He made the mistake of reading philosophy as a teen but then read science fiction instead, and his favorite was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Curiosity has formats. He played Dungeons and Dragons. Intensity compresses learning time. He learned BASIC in three days when it was supposed to take 60 hours. Tools unlock momentum. He got his own personal computer, created a video game, and went to a university conference on personal computers. A clean break can be survival, not drama. When he was almost 18, he moved to Canada to get away from his father and slept in a teen home. Take the next bus, take the next job, keep moving. He got a bus ticket to Vancouver, got an internship at Microsoft, then worked at a bank. Knowing you're not cut out to work for someone is useful data. He worked at a bank and realized he isn't cut out for working for someone. If school is too easy, upgrade the difficulty. He went to Queen's University for two years and the academics were too easy, so he transferred to Penn. Study what protects you from being boxed in. He studied physics and business because he figured he would end up working for someone with a business degree if he didn't get one. Internships are experiments. He interned at a company making a capacitor which holds electricity and another one that made video games, then denied the full-time offer because he wanted to do something meaningful instead of making video games. Build something practical that maps the world. Zip2 was software that had different companies on a map interface and users could look up companies near them. Titles matter less than bottlenecks. He was named CTO but realized nothing could get done if he wasn’t CEO. Trying to take the CEO role can fail, and that failure becomes part of the education. He tried to get the role but was denied. An exit can fund the next chapter. A bigger company convinced them to sell and Elon made $22 million. If the official plan does not exist, that can become the reason you start. Elon looked at NASA's website and found no plan to go to Mars, so he decided to do it himself. He didn’t want technology to stop at the moon. He compared it to how building the pyramids disappeared or the Roman Aqueducts were gone during the dark ages. Go where the people are who care about the idea. He went to a meeting called Mars Society and got a plan together. Trying to buy the shortcut can teach you why you need to build the real thing. He went to Russia to buy used rockets; they were way too expensive. He figured using used rockets wouldn't improve the technology, so he decided to build his own. Grief does not pause the mission; it just makes everything heavier. Soon after, his first baby died from sudden infant death syndrome and he was grief-stricken. Unrealistic deadlines can be the culture, like Steve Jobs. Elon set unrealistic deadlines and expected you to keep up, just like Steve Jobs. Small checks can start big partnerships. JB Straubel wanted to make an electric car, so Elon gave him $10,000 and he partnered with Tesla Motors. When failure has a cause, it becomes a clue. Musk's first SpaceX launch failed because of the salty air on Kwaj Island. He stuck with it for the long run. If nothing moves unless you take the wheel, you take the wheel. Musk decides to do it himself and becomes CEO of Tesla. When the world says "pick one," sometimes you pick both. Three rockets failed at SpaceX; he was running out of money because of the 2008 recession. People told him to choose either Tesla or SpaceX, but he decided to give his all to both. Being kept alive by friends is still being kept alive. The fourth rocket succeeds because his friends from PayPal donated $20 million. One big contract can change the survival odds. He gets $1.2 billion from NASA. Sometimes a company survives because people keep donating to it. More people donate to Tesla and that’s the only reason it’s alive today. Integrate design with engineering. The Model S design was integrated with the engineering, just like the Apple iPhone. Competition can turn into lawsuits and then into a race. Musk and Bezos competed for a Pad, Musk got it, Bezos sued, Bezos later got his own pad and the space race started. Landing first is one metric. Orbit is another. Bezos landed a rocket first, but it didn't reach orbit, and Musk landed a rocket that did in December of 2015, the Falcon 9. People can agree on a mission and later diverge hard. Musk and Sam Altman made OpenAI, which is an open-source nonprofit. Altman later turned it into a for-profit, and Musk started to make his own AI. If a company is too focused on sales, an operator may try to turn it into product. Musk bought SolarCity and made a solar roof with a Tesla in the garage, calling it an integrated system. Both of his cousins left the company, though. When survival is the constraint, the leader goes to the factory. Musk had to make 5,000 Teslas or else the company would die, so he went down to the factory himself and made some changes. Question every requirement: Find out the name of the real person who made the requirement. Then question it if you really need it. Delete any part or process you can. You can add them back later. If you do not end up adding back 10%, you didn’t delete enough. Simplify and optimize: This must come after step two. 4: accelerate cycle time: every process can be speeded up Automate: This must come last after all the kinks are worked out and requirements are questioned. Management rules that go with it: All technical managers must have hands-on experience. Camaraderie is dangerous because it makes it hard for people to challenge each other's work. It's OK to be wrong, just don't be confident and wrong. Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do. When hiring, look for people with the right attitude; skills can be taught but an attitude change requires a human transplant. “open butthole” opens the Tesla charging port. Say open butthole to a Tesla and it will open its charging port in the back😂 China manufacturing can become the majority of output. Elon got China to make Teslas without a joint venture and now they are making over half of their production. Selling "stuff" can be a values statement. Elon sold all of his California houses so he wasn't a billionaire with "stuff." Sometimes hiring happens because you wait in the right place long enough. Kiko Dontchev waited for five hours in front of Musk's cubicle and got hired on the spot. Some leaders will fire fast, even if there’s history. Musk would fire many employees, even ones he had history with if they couldn’t keep up. Starlink became leverage in a war context. Musk sent over some Starlink satellites to help Ukraine, then told engineers to turn the Starlink satellites off in an area when Ukraine wanted to use them to go on the offensive. Family beliefs can get weird. Elon's dad became a conspiracy theorist who liked Putin and Trump. He said vaccines are dangerous and Elon came to share that belief. Product visions can get negotiated down into something shippable. Robotaxi with no steering wheel changed into aiming for a $25,000 mass market car that doubles as a robotaxi instead. He preferred "hardcore" over "psychological safety." He didn't like days of rest for "psychological safety"; he preferred "hardcore" and believed discomfort was a good thing. He also doesn't like work-life balance. Culture clashes can turn into mass firings. He fired the woman in charge of marketing and people at Twitter, later fired 75% of Twitter. The Twitter situation was bad. Changing identity systems creates chaos. Elon introduced the blue check mark and people began impersonating other people and someone said: “BREAKING: A second Tesla has hit the World Trade Center.” Neuralink's stated goal shifted. Neuralink is now about curing blindness, deafness, and paralysis instead of moving computer mice with your mind. Free speech has exceptions when it gets personal. Even though he was for free speech, he banned Elonjet after someone was stalking his bodyguard and his son. Sometimes “do it yourself” is literal. Elon grabs a knife, goes under the floor, and disconnects the cables himself😂 He started X.AI to create a safe AI. He started with making chatbots similar to ChatGPT and will eventually use all of Tesla's video footage and Twitter's data to make an AI that can react with the real world. Risk is part of the learning plan. Starship was self-destruct; this was their goal and they learned a lot. Instead of risk-proofing everything, he made some risky moves that might fail but that they can learn from. He thinks if all they did was try to eliminate all risk, they wouldn't go anywhere.