My top 20 highlights from the book:
1. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle.
2. All bad news should be given loudly and often. Good news can be said quietly and once.
3. I am wired for war.
4. Elon is not sentimental about people leaving. He likes fresh blood.
5. When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.
6. If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible, then unconventional thinking is necessary.
7. If a timeline is long, it’s wrong.
8. He liked to focus on work. He treated the rest of his life as an unpleasant distraction.
9. Optimism, pessimism, fuck that. We're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.
10. I became a broken record on the algorithm. But I think it's helpful to say it to an annoying degree. (Elon's algorithm is included in full, at the bottom of this email.)
11. Precision is not expensive. It’s mostly about caring. Do you care to make it precise? Then you can make it precise.
12. Camaraderie 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.
13. One of Elon's favorite words — and concepts — was "hardcore." He used it to describe the workplace culture he wanted.
14. If they see the general out on the battlefield, the troops are going to be motivated. Wherever Napoleon was, that's where his armies would do best.
15. The best part is no part. We are on a deletion rampage! Nothing is sacred. Please go ultra-hardcore on deletion and simplification.
16. One of Elon's rules is: Go as close to the source as possible for information.
17. Discomfort, he believed, was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency.
18. Elon calculated that he made a hundred command decisions a day as he walked the floor. At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we're going to alter them later. But if I don't make decisions, we die.
19. He would go for broke, literally. "I will never give up, and I mean never," he said.
20. Life needs to be interesting and edgy.
Listen to #399 How Elon Works on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
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Elon's algorithm has five commandments:
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 the 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 of the process you can. You may have to add them back later. If fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough.
3. Simplify and organize. 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. This comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.
Elon's algorithm has five commandments:
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 the 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 of the process you can. You may have to add them back later. If fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough.
3. Simplify and organize. 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. This comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.