Elon Musk's core principles were evident from his first company, Zip2. His love for strategy games, like the board game Diplomacy, honed his tactical skills. He told a friend, "I am wired for war," a phrase he would repeat for decades. From his early 20s, Elon disliked working for others and was not deferential, assuming he knew more than his superiors.

At Zip2, he established a "hardcore" work culture, with employees sleeping in the office and showering at the YMCA. Elon understood that showmanship is a form of salesmanship. To impress visitors and investors, they placed a small computer inside a large frame to make it look like they had a giant server. He recognized the power of a dramatic demonstration, a tactic he would use throughout his career.

As a manager, Elon was demanding and contemptuous of work-life balance. He drove himself relentlessly and expected the same from others, his only indulgence being intense video game binges. He believed being overly collegial with colleagues was both counterproductive and dangerous, as it distracted from the mission. He didn't care about being liked by his team.

It's not your job to make people on your team love you. In fact, that's counterproductive.

Elon has always hated middlemen, preferring full control and selling directly to consumers. After selling Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million, which gave him $22 million at age 27, his focus wasn't on the money. He saw it as a tool for his next venture.

I could go buy an island, but I'm much more interested in trying to build and create a new company. I'm going to put almost all of it back into a new game.

This pattern of reinvesting earnings into new companies became a defining trait. His high risk tolerance meant he was either going to be "wealthy or broke," with nothing in between. A key part of his success is his ability to transfer his own belief to others, making them believe in his vision even when it seems audacious. His obsessive, intense management style, characterized by setting insane deadlines, has remained unchanged since his first company.

What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way.

A core part of Elon Musk's working philosophy is an obsession with simplification and deleting. This was evident early on at PayPal, where he focused on minimizing the number of keystrokes needed to open an account. His ambition was never to create niche products but to remake entire industries, a goal that grew significantly after selling PayPal.

He carried a distinct organizational philosophy to all his companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter. He believed separating a product's design from its engineering was dysfunctional. Instead, he integrated engineers with project managers. This ensured designers would feel the immediate difficulty if their ideas were hard to engineer. He also felt that engineers, not product managers, should lead teams.

A recurring theme is Elon's deep, detailed knowledge of his companies. Max Levchin, a PayPal co-founder, noted that Elon would sometimes surprise specialists by knowing more about their own domain than they did. This sharpness is a key part of how he motivates people. He also firmly believed the CEO should be the public face and best spokesperson for the company.

His personal style is described as relentless, rough, and risk-taking, with a level of certainty that leads him to go all-in. Despite being ousted as CEO of PayPal, he maintained relationships with his co-founders, which proved crucial for SpaceX years later. His self-confidence is immense. Decades later, he told Walter Isaacson about his time at PayPal:

If I had stayed, PayPal would be a trillion dollar company.

After PayPal, Elon’s ambition skyrocketed. He decided to start a rocket company, teaching himself the subject by reading books at the Palo Alto Public Library. This habit of devouring entire library shelves on a subject of interest is common among historical entrepreneurs. His goal was clear:

My mission in life is to make mankind a multi planetary civilization.

Elon's approach is to start with a grand mission and then figure out how to make it financially viable. This was a wild proposition for a 30-year-old who had been ousted from two startups. He operates on the principle that technological progress is not inevitable; it only improves if people work very hard to make it better. A key skill is his ability to frame his vision as an essential, inspiring mandate. He believes life needs more than just problem-solving.

Life cannot be merely about solving problems. It also has to be about pursuing great dreams. That is what will get us up in the morning.

He is also intensely practical. He constantly searches for bottlenecks and goes directly to the problem, staying until it is solved. This is why he moved to Los Angeles to start his rocket company. As Elon explained, the probability of success was already low, but it would have been even lower if he hadn't moved to where the critical mass of aerospace engineering talent was located.

A single sentence can reveal a person's entire story. For Elon Musk, one such sentence is: "He didn't even explain the move to Justine," his first wife. This illustrates a pattern that reappears throughout his life. Elon was not made for domestic tranquility. It's nearly impossible to dedicate as much of your life to work as he does and also maintain conventional relationships.

While trying to figure out how to build his own rocket, Elon developed one of his greatest ideas, a concept he would use for the rest of his career: the Idiot Index. This was a result of first-principles thinking, which involves drilling down to the basic physics of a situation and building up from there.

The Idiot Index calculated how much more costly a finished product was than the cost of its basic materials. If a product had a high Idiot Index, its cost could be reduced significantly by devising more efficient manufacturing techniques.

Rockets had an extremely high Idiot Index. After calculating the cost of the carbon fiber, metal, fuel, and other materials, Elon determined that the finished product cost at least 50 times more than its raw components. This highlights his obsession with controlling costs, a trait he shares with history's greatest entrepreneurs, from Carnegie to Rockefeller. Great business leaders stay in the details on costs.

Andrew Carnegie, who once held the world's largest liquid fortune, had a similar obsession. His mantra emphasized the difference between prices and costs.

Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled and any savings achieved in the cost of goods were permanent.

For both Carnegie and Elon, cost control is an obsession and a key to their success.

Elon Musk's management philosophy emphasizes clustering design, engineering, and manufacturing teams together. This proximity ensures immediate feedback. People on the assembly line can directly approach a designer or engineer to question a design choice. Elon uses an analogy to explain this need for a fast feedback loop.

If your hand is on a stove and it gets hot, you pull it right off. But if it's someone else's hand on the stove, it'll take you longer to do something.

Separating these teams allows mistakes to fester. This philosophy extends to people. Elon rapidly churns through employees who are negative or believe something is impossible. He wants people who will make things happen.

A laser focus on cost is another critical principle. He challenges the high prices from aerospace suppliers, which can be ten times higher than similar parts in the auto industry. He frequently asks about the "Idiot Index" of a component. His focus on cost and control leads him to manufacture as many components as possible in-house, bucking the industry standard of using suppliers. In one instance, a supplier quoted a price of $120,000 for a part. Believing it was no more complex than a garage door opener, Elon had his engineer build it for only $5,000.

This leads to another core tenet: question every single requirement. It became the first step in a five-point checklist called "the algorithm." When an engineer cited a requirement, Elon would press them on who specifically made it. He insisted on knowing the name of the person, not just the department.

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

A "maniacal sense of urgency" is a declared operating principle. When a schedule was presented, Elon would demand it be cut in half, and then in half again. He once challenged an engineer, Tom Mueller, by asking if he wanted to remain in charge of engines after Mueller balked at a shortened timeline. Mueller later admitted that while they often failed to meet Elon's aggressive schedules, this approach ensured they still beat all their peers.

Elon expects everyone to know all the details of their part of the business and acts as a "frontline general," working on the factory floor and directly with the people doing the work. He is known for wanting total control and not partnering well with other companies. An exception is his long-standing relationship with Gwynne Shotwell, who has worked with him for over 20 years. When they first met, she bluntly told him the person handling customer discussions was a "loser." The next day, he offered her the job. The lesson is that people like Elon respect strength and directness, as few people tell them the truth once they become powerful.

Elon Musk focused on the importance of the mission rather than the business potential. A key example of his obsession with cost and general control was the decision for Tesla to make its own key components. Instead of assembling a car from hundreds of suppliers, Tesla would be vertically integrated. This allowed the company to control its destiny, quality, cost, and supply chain.

Creating a good car was important, but even more so was crafting the manufacturing processes and factories to mass-produce them, from battery cells to the car body. This approach mirrors the early days of the auto industry. Pioneers like Henry Ford also did most of the work in-house. Ford was so obsessed with control that he even owned a railroad to ensure a steady supply of materials. The American auto industry later deviated from this model, which led to a decline in quality. Decades later, Elon revived this strategy of controlling everything.

This preference for control and being anti-outsourcing is fundamental to his nature. He needs to have ultimate authority, does not like to defer, and cannot stop himself from getting involved in design and engineering decisions.

A key benefit of Elon Musk running multiple companies simultaneously is the transfer of ideas and lessons between them. For example, he suggested using techniques and equipment from SpaceX to solve production challenges at Tesla. When a colleague pushed back on the cost of carbon fiber for Tesla, Elon emailed him a solution using a soft oven from SpaceX.

Dude, you could make the body panels for at least 500 cars per year if you bought the soft oven we have at SpaceX. If someone tells you this is hard work, they are full of shit.

Underpinning his work is a superhuman level of determination. This dedication was often underestimated, even by those who had previously profited from his ventures. Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, despite having made money from PayPal, declined to invest in Tesla, viewing competition with Toyota as an impossible mission.

Years later, Moritz conceded, "I didn't appreciate the strength of Elon's determination."

Elon also believes in the power of showmanship as a form of salesmanship. He views product launches as major events and is obsessed with the details. For the first Tesla Roadster prototype event, he personally oversaw everything from the guest list and menu to the design and cost of the napkins. This highlights his principle: if it's important, he does it himself.

He also emphasizes the importance of failure. Elon suggests that after the first 50 failures, which are painful, you become less emotional and more capable of taking calculated risks. The process of innovation inevitably involves making decisions that one might later regret.

One of the key concepts from a book about Elon Musk is that the people who succeed the most also experience the most failures. A significant factor contributing to both his successes and failures is his lack of patience, described as a "virtue he lacked."

An example of this was the decision to build and launch the first SpaceX rockets from a remote island called Kwajalein. Elon later admitted this was a mistake and that he should have waited for Vandenberg Air Force Base to become available. His impatience led him to choose a much harder path.

Every now and then, you shoot yourself in the foot. If you had to pick a path that reduced the probability of success, it would be to launch from an inaccessible tropical island.

The remote location created immense logistical challenges. In one instance, they needed capacitors from an electronics supplier in Minnesota. An intern in Texas was sent to Minnesota to retrieve them. Meanwhile, another employee removed the power boxes from the rocket on a Pacific island, took a boat to Kwajalein, flew to Honolulu, then to Los Angeles, and drove to SpaceX headquarters. There, he met the intern who had arrived from Minnesota with the new capacitors. After swapping them into the power boxes, he and Elon flew back to the island on Elon's private jet. During the flight, despite not having had a single successful launch yet, Elon intensely questioned him on every detail of the circuitry.

An excerpt from a biography of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance illustrates how he thinks about the relationship between time and money. An early SpaceX employee shared Elon's philosophy. At the time, the company was burning through $100,000 per day. This created a very entrepreneurial, Silicon Valley way of thinking that was foreign to many traditional aerospace engineers.

Elon’s spending decisions were based on the value of time. Sometimes he would refuse to let someone buy a $2,000 part, expecting them to find or invent a cheaper alternative. Other times, he would not hesitate to rent a plane for $90,000 to deliver a part because it saved an entire workday. The key insight was his sense of urgency, which was tied to future earnings.

He expected the revenue in 10 years to be $10 million a day, and that every day we were slower to achieve our goals was a day of missing out on that money.

Elon also responded to failures, like a rocket blowing up, with a firm commitment to the long-term vision. After an unsuccessful mission, he posted a statement reaffirming the company's resolve.

SpaceX is in this for the long haul. Come hell or high water, we are going to make this work.

Elon Musk operates with a core principle: physically go to the source of a problem. When the target cost for the Roadster swelled from $50,000 to $83,000, he didn't hesitate. He got on his plane, picked up an employee, and flew directly to the Lotus factory in England to figure out what was happening. This hands-on approach is something he uses repeatedly.

Another key idea he constantly teaches is to prioritize the mission over personal feelings. He believes you are not friends with people on your team. This isn't about being needlessly harsh. It's about preventing a larger failure. Wanting to be everyone's friend can lead to tolerating B or C players, which jeopardizes the entire enterprise and can hurt thousands of people if the mission fails. In his view, it's better to hurt one person's feelings than to let the whole venture collapse. This aligns with the idea that top performers don't want to work with unclear thinkers.

A players don't want to be around fuzzy thinkers.

Elon is described as a very clear thinker. While his demands might seem impossible, his intentions are never ambiguous. He also makes it clear that he requires ultimate control.

I've got to have both hands on the steering wheel. I can't have two of us driving.

His intensity is a defining characteristic. His first wife, Justine, offered a vivid description of his personality, noting he has multiple personalities in one head.

He's strong willed and powerful like a bear. He can be playful and funny and romp around with you, but in the end, you're still dealing with a bear.

This relentless determination is a common theme. Even after SpaceX crashed three rockets in a row, Elon was not ready to give up. He was willing to go for broke to achieve his goals.

I will never give up. And I mean never. 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.

An essential quality for any entrepreneur is the capacity to take pain, and Elon Musk is described as having an unlimited supply of it. During the 2008 crisis, when both SpaceX and Tesla were on the verge of collapse, the stress was immense. His second wife, Tallulah Riley, described his state at the time.

Tallulah watched in horror as night after night Elon had mumbling conversations with himself, sometimes flailing his arms and screaming. He was having night terrors and just screaming in his sleep. He would wake up, go to the bathroom and start vomiting.

Musk himself recalled the period as one where he was constantly required to perform miracles. This resilience was paired with strategic thinking that ultimately saved his companies. For SpaceX, the lifeline came from an unexpected source. Years earlier, when Musk was ousted from PayPal in a coup, he chose not to burn bridges with his former co-founders. This decision proved crucial.

After I got assassinated by the PayPal coup leaders like Caesar being stabbed in the Senate, I could have said, you guys suck, but I didn't. If I had done that Founders Fund wouldn't have come through in 2008 and SpaceX would be dead.

For Tesla, survival depended on combining a "maniacal sense of urgency" with dramatic demonstrations. When Daimler executives visited to discuss a potential electric car partnership, Tesla did more than prepare a presentation. The team bought a Daimler smart car and retrofitted it with a Tesla Roadster's electric motor and battery pack. Instead of a PowerPoint, the Daimler team was offered a test drive. The car's instant acceleration, reaching 60 miles per hour in four seconds, astonished them. This hands-on demonstration directly led to Daimler making a $50 million equity investment in Tesla. Elon states plainly, "If Daimler had not invested in Tesla at that time, we would have died."

If a design is difficult to manufacture in large numbers, the design is flawed. Design is not just about aesthetics; true industrial design must connect a product's look to its engineering. This view is echoed by Steve Jobs.

In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. Nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.

Elon Musk also prioritizes personality, fun, and unexpectedness in his products. For example, the early Tesla Model S had door handles that stayed flush with the car, then popped out and lit up when the driver approached. The head designer called this a "happy handshake." While a standard handle would have worked, Elon embraced the idea.

The handle senses your approach, lights up, pops out to greet you, and it's magical. It's also fun and unexpected.

When you surprise and delight customers, they form a deeper emotional bond with the company and tell others about it. This is a form of showmanship as salesmanship.

Elon is relentless about reducing costs and questioning requirements. He saved money on SpaceX cranes by challenging obsolete Air Force safety regulations, reducing the cost from $2 million to $300,000. He constantly compares costs across industries. For example, NASA's latches cost $1,500 each, so a SpaceX engineer modified a $30 bathroom stall latch for the rocket. When an air cooling system was quoted at $3 million, Elon's team bought commercial air conditioning units for around $6,000 and modified them instead.

A "maniacal sense of urgency" is a core operating principle. The day before a launch, an inspection revealed two small cracks in a rocket's engine skirt. The usual plan would be to delay for weeks and replace the engine. Instead, Elon suggested just cutting off the cracked part. The skirt was trimmed with shears, and the rocket launched the next day.

Elon is also against outsourcing, preferring tight control and daily iteration. He believes that by sending factories abroad, companies lose the daily feel for how to improve their products. He considers designing the factory—the machine that builds the machine—as important as designing the product itself. This creates a tight design-manufacturing feedback loop for daily innovation. He spent more time on assembly lines than in the design studio.

The brain strain of designing the car is tiny compared to the brain strain of designing the factory.

This approach ensures his teams feel the immediate pain and feedback of their work.

To ensure engineers felt the impact of their designs, Elon Musk placed their cubicles directly on the edge of the factory assembly lines. This meant they would see the flashing lights and hear complaints whenever their work caused a slowdown. He focused relentlessly on root causes, tracing production line problems all the way back to the initial design flaws.

This demanding approach defined the workplace culture he wanted to build, which he described as "hardcore." As the Model S production ramped up, he sent an email to employees titled "Ultra Hardcore" to set expectations.

Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before. Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart.

Elon is maniacal about repeating a few core principles across all his companies: simplify, reduce costs, delete unnecessary parts, and frame every endeavor as having world-changing significance. At SpaceX, he obsessed over reducing the weight of his rockets. He understood that removing even a small amount of weight by deleting a part or using a lighter material has a multiplier effect, as it requires less fuel, which further reduces the rocket's mass. He would walk the assembly lines, stare at each station, and challenge teams to remove or trim something. He consistently connected this granular work to the grand vision.

A fully reusable rocket is the difference between being a single planet civilization and being a multi planetary one.

When employees pushed back, citing technical challenges, Elon would be unrelenting, often falling back on first principles logic. He would say, "There is no first principles reason this cannot work. It's extraordinarily difficult, I know, but you have to muscle through." This intense focus on work came at a high personal cost. Elon treated the rest of his life as an unpleasant distraction, admitting that the extreme hours made personal relationships difficult to maintain.

Elon Musk often compares the products he's building to how things work in the natural world. For instance, he resisted using lidar in self-driving systems because humans drive with only visual data, so machines should be able to as well. He distills impossibly complex goals into simple, understandable sentences, like making a car drive like a human or digging a hole like a gopher.

A core tenet of his approach is a "maniacal sense of urgency." This means starting immediately. When he decided to start the Boring Company, he called a trusted engineer at 2 a.m. to study tunnel building and called him back three hours later for an update. He then instructed the engineer to buy two five-million-dollar tunneling machines. His constant questions are, "How can we move faster? What are the impediments?" He pushes his teams to delete steps and simplify processes. When his team was drilling a vertical shaft to lower a tunneling machine, Elon pointed out that this wasn't how gophers operate.

The gopher in my yard doesn't do that.

This observation led them to redesign the machine so it could simply aim its nose down and start digging. The intense, all-consuming work schedule requires periods of deep thought. To solve problems, Elon will sometimes isolate himself, lie down, and shut off the lights, a method also used by Jim Simons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies.

Elon seems to thrive in chaotic, high-stakes environments. During the push to scale Model 3 production, he famously declared they were entering "production hell." The goal was simple and existential: build 5,000 cars per week or the company would die. This mantra was repeated constantly, with factory monitors showing up-to-the-minute output. He told his employees he looked forward to "journeying through hell" with them. Even on the verge of bankruptcy, his operating principles remain consistent: set huge goals with tight deadlines and live at the company until the job is done.

Elon Musk decided to move himself onto the factory floor to lead an all-out effort to solve production issues. He expects his employees to work just as he does, never asking them to do something he isn't doing himself. This period is when he refined his problem-solving method, often called the algorithm.

The algorithm's steps are to first find the bottleneck, then keep asking why until you get to the root cause. After that, delete and simplify. This approach often goes against human nature, which tends to over-complicate things. The first step is always to question the requirements. As Elon said, you must "make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete."

One example involved a slow robot gluing fiberglass strips to battery packs. When Elon asked why the strips were needed, the engineering and noise reduction teams pointed fingers at each other. Elon called it a "Dilbert cartoon." He ordered a test to compare the car's sound with and without the fiberglass. No one could tell the difference, so the part was eliminated. A similar situation occurred with plastic caps put on battery pack prongs. They were put on in one factory and removed in another, sometimes holding up shipments. When no one could trace who required them, Elon ordered them deleted, and it caused no issues.

During this intense period, Elon shifted from being an apostle of automation to a new mission: de-automation. After a highly automated production line failed to work, he began systematically removing robots.

We began sawing robots out of the production line and throwing them into the parking lot. We had to put a hole in the side of the building just to remove all the equipment.

This experience led to a core principle: only introduce automation after you have questioned all requirements and deleted unnecessary parts. To identify problems quickly, he implemented a system called "walk to the red." A monitor showed each station with a green or red light. He would walk directly to any red light and start problem-solving on the spot, constantly questioning specifications and testing limits.

He was incredibly decisive, calculating that he made 100 command decisions a day. He understood that many would be wrong, but believed indecision was the real threat.

At least 20% are going to be wrong, and we're going to alter them later. But if I don't make decisions, we die.

He also took full responsibility and blame for his decisions, turning the removal of robots into a game with his team while accepting the consequences himself.

Elon Musk once took public responsibility for over-automating Tesla's production lines, admitting it was a mistake and that humans are underrated. During a period known as "production hell," the company needed to produce 5,000 Model 3s per week to survive. Musk draws lessons from diverse sources, including science fiction, history, and even how gophers dig holes. He applied a lesson from World War II, where bombers were assembled in parking lots, by setting up a new Model 3 assembly line in a tent in Tesla's parking lot. This unconventional approach helped Tesla hit its production target.

If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible, then unconventional thinking is necessary.

This experience helped shape what Musk calls "the algorithm," a five-step mantra he repeated so often that his executives could mouth the words along with him. He believed in this repetition, saying, "I became a broken record on the algorithm. I think it's helpful to say it to an annoyingly degree."

The algorithm consists of five commandments:

1. Question every requirement. Each one must be tied to a specific person, not a department. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous because they are less likely to be questioned.
2. Delete any part of the process you can. Be aggressive. If you don't add back at least 10% of what you remove, you haven't deleted enough.
3. Simplify and organize. This step comes only after deleting unnecessary parts. A common mistake is to optimize a process that should not exist.
4. Accelerate cycle time. Speed up processes only after the first three steps are complete. Musk admitted he mistakenly accelerated processes that should have been deleted.
5. Automate. This is the final step. The major mistake at Tesla's factories was trying to automate everything from the beginning, before questioning requirements and simplifying the process.

Several core ideas accompany Elon Musk's main problem-solving algorithm. One principle is that all technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, software managers must spend at least 20% of their time coding, and solar roof managers must perform installations on roofs. Otherwise, Elon sees them as a cavalry leader who cannot ride a horse.

He also believes camaraderie is dangerous because it makes it difficult for people to challenge each other's work. Other principles include: it is okay to be wrong, just not confident and wrong; never ask your troops to do something you are not willing to do; and when hiring, look for the right attitude since skills can be taught while changing an attitude requires a "brain transplant." To solve problems, he advocates for skipping managers and meeting directly with the people doing the actual work.

A core tenet is that "a maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle." This is paired with the idea that "the only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation." This philosophy was in practice when Tesla lobbied and convinced China's leaders to change a law that had been in place for three decades, allowing them to build a factory without a joint venture partner.

Elon is not sentimental about people leaving, as he values fresh perspectives to combat the complacency he calls "phoning it in." His urgency can be extreme. He once flew to Seattle and fired the entire top Starlink team, replacing them with rocket engineers who understood how to apply his first-principles approach. To push boundaries, he constantly seeks the absolute limit. When building stainless steel water towers, he asked the welders—the people doing the work—how thin the walls could be. They said 4.8 millimeters felt safe. Elon pushed, "What about four?" When they admitted that would make them nervous, he responded, "Okay, let's do 4 millimeters." It worked. This reflects his drive to delete as much as possible, which requires finding the true physical limits.

One of Elon Musk's core principles is to start with whatever is available and resist the urge to overcomplicate things. He once grew frustrated at the slow pace of a crew who still had not made a single dome for Starship. He issued a challenge: build a dome by dawn. When told it was not feasible because they lacked the proper calibration equipment, Elon was blunt.

We're going to make a dome by dawn if it fucking kills us. Slice off the end of that rocket barrel and use that as your fitting tool.

Crucially, he stayed with the team of engineers and welders until the dome was finished around 9 a.m. His hands-on approach is a key part of his method; he is in the factories, on the roofs, and under the cars. This highlights his belief in pushing past perceived limits and imaginary delays. In stark contrast to the fast-paced modern world, another of his practices is spending long periods in silent thought. His former girlfriend, Grimes, described how he would sometimes sit upright on the edge of the bed, not moving until dawn.

Every couple of hours I would wake up and he was just still sitting there, completely still in the thinking man statue pose. Just completely silent on the edge of the bed.

Elon Musk's relentless dedication to questioning requirements and working from first principles is exemplified by a story involving a toy Model S. While playing with a toy version of the car, he noticed its entire underbody was die-cast as a single piece of metal. He immediately asked his team, "Why can't we do that?" An engineer explained that no casting machines existed to handle something that large, but that answer didn't satisfy Elon. He insisted it didn't break the laws of physics and told them to figure it out. His team called six major casting companies; five dismissed the idea, but one agreed to take on the challenge and built the world's largest casting machine.

This process reinforced Elon's appreciation for the toy industry. He noted that toy companies must produce things very quickly and cheaply without flaws, all before Christmas. He often pushed his teams to get ideas from toys like robots and Legos. He admired the high precision of Lego pieces, which are accurate to within 10 microns of each other, allowing any part to be easily replaced. He believed car components should be the same way.

Precision is not expensive. It is mostly about caring. Do you care to make it precise? Then you can make it precise.

Elon feared complacency and maintained a "maniacal sense of urgency." During a late-night visit to a launch pad, he became enraged when he found only two of 783 employees working. He expected unrelenting intensity from everyone. In response, he went into "hardcore, all-in mode," moving into the hangar at Cape Canaveral to work around the clock.

This intensity shaped his hiring practices. At that point in SpaceX's history, he still interviewed every engineer. He prioritized attitude over a resume, and his definition of a good attitude was a "desire to work maniacally hard." He was also remorseless and mission-first, believing that camaraderie is dangerous because it makes people hesitant to challenge each other's work. This led him to push out one of SpaceX's first engineers after 18 years, telling him in an email, "You did an awesome job over many years, but eventually everyone's time comes to retire."

Elon Musk's management style is built on several repeated principles. He believes rockets should be like airplanes, capable of taking off, landing, and taking off again quickly. He constantly preaches that "the best part is no part," emphasizing the need to delete unnecessary components.

This philosophy extends to his relationships with employees. He believes camaraderie is dangerous because emotions can blur judgment. He once lectured his team, making it clear he did not want them to be friends with their engineers.

I want to be super clear. You are not a friend of the engineers. You are the judge. If you're popular among your engineers, this is bad. If you don't step on toes, I will fire you.

Elon is unrelenting in his demand for deep knowledge. He quizzes employees using what he calls the "Idiot Index." He expects them to know every detail of their area. In one meeting, he drilled an engineer named Hughes about the best parts in the Raptor engine. When Hughes was unsure, Elon was furious.

You better fucking be sure in the future that you know these things. Off the top of your head, if you ever come into a meeting and do not know what the idiot parts are, then your resignation will be accepted immediately.

The conversation continued with Elon quizzing Hughes on the cost of a part. Hughes estimated the material cost at a few thousand dollars. Elon, obsessed with costs, knew the exact number.

No, it's just steel. It's 200 bucks. If you don't improve, your resignation will be accepted.

When questioned about his harshness, Elon defended his approach. He believes in giving "hardcore feedback" that focuses on the action, not the person.

Physics does not care about hurt feelings. It cares about whether you got the rocket right.

Another of his repeated mantras is that leaders must be "frontline generals" who stay close to the work. When an engineer for solar roofs admitted he had never personally installed one, Elon was dismissive.

Then you don't fucking know what you're talking about. That's why your roofs are shit and take so long to install.

The engineer then spent the next day installing roofs, which Elon considered a valuable education. He believes engineers should spend 20% of their time doing the actual work to understand design and manufacturing problems firsthand. If a significant problem arises, he will schedule meetings every 24 hours until it is resolved.

This maniacal dedication to the mission impacts his personal life. His ex-girlfriend, Grimes, wrote a song called "Player of Games" about him. A key line illustrates his priorities: "he'll always love the game more than he loves me." This reflects a common trait among many ambitious founders who are not built for domestic tranquility.

Elon Musk differentiates his companies by their level of inevitability. He believes mass-market electric cars were bound to happen, but humanity becoming a space-faring civilization is not. This makes SpaceX his most important endeavor. This reflects a powerful investment thesis: "Invest only in things that wouldn't happen without us." This can be a useful organizing principle for deciding what to dedicate your life to.

A core part of his approach is a "maniacal sense of urgency." He believes it is better to try and fail quickly than to analyze an issue for months. Fast action leads to fast feedback and fast fixes. This principle is applied directly to engineering, such as with the drastic simplification of the Raptor engine design over time.

To maintain this speed, Elon emphasizes direct involvement and immediate feedback loops. He personally interviews and selects key engineers. He insists that design and production teams work together, breaking down the traditional silos. He argues that designers should sit next to the assembly line to receive direct feedback.

The people on the assembly line should be able to immediately collar a designer or an engineer and say, why the fuck did you make it this way?

This hands-on approach is compared to feeling your own hand on a hot stove; you react instantly. If it's someone else's hand, the response is slower. His drive for simplification is relentless, as shown in an email he sent regarding a rocket engine design.

We are on a deletion rampage. Nothing is sacred. Any remotely questionable tubes, sensors, manifolds, et cetera will be deleted tonight. Please go ultra hardcore on deletion and simplification.

While working with him is demanding, the learning experience is unparalleled. Many younger employees thrive but may seek more balance later in life. However, the intensity is often seen as a worthwhile trade-off.

I noticed that I learned more unique lessons from Elon per minute than any other human I've met. It would be dumb to not spend some of your life with such a person.

The lessons learned from this environment can be applied for the rest of one's career.

The idea for the podcast Founders came directly from Elon Musk. In a 2012 interview, Elon was asked how he learned to build companies. He explained that he didn't read business books or have traditional mentors. Instead, he sought mentorship from historical figures by reading their biographies, mentioning names like Ben Franklin, Henry Ford, and Nikola Tesla. This inspired the host to read more biographies, which ultimately led to the podcast.

After reading numerous books on Elon, one idea became deeply lodged in the host's mind: Elon's fanatical dedication to simplification. His core principle is to delete and simplify relentlessly. This is essential because complexity is the enemy of scaling. An anecdote from a biography illustrates this obsession. When presented with a Neuralink device, Elon paused for two minutes, then declared he hated it because it was too complex, with too many wires and connections.

He was already in the process of deleting connections from SpaceX's Raptor engines, viewing each one as a potential failure point. He told the Neuralink engineers there had to be a single, elegant device with no external wires or routers, as no law of physics prevented it. When they tried to explain the need for a separate router, Elon's face turned stony.

delete, delete, delete, delete.

Elon Musk learns from everything he experiences, including video games. He was obsessed with a multiplayer strategy game called Polytopia, which he believes can make someone a better CEO. He even came up with a list of "Polytopia life lessons."

Key lessons include empathy not being an asset and the importance of playing life like a game. Elon advises not to fear losing, as it's inevitable. He explains, "It will hurt the first 50 times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion. You will be more fearless, take more risks." Other lessons are to be proactive, optimize every turn, and double down by putting everything back into the game to grow. He connects this directly to his ambitions: "In Polytopia, you only get 30 turns, so you need to optimize each one... If you let a few of them slide, we will never get to Mars."

This mindset reflects his oft-repeated maxim, "I am just wired for war." When told he doesn't have to be in a constant state of war, he replied, "It's part of my default settings." He finds extended periods of calm unnerving. His life's focus is on doing useful, inspiring, and edgy things for civilization. This philosophy combines working on inspiring projects, maintaining a "maniacal sense of urgency," and framing his endeavors as having epoch-making significance.

A meeting at SpaceX illustrates this intensity. Angry about project timelines he called "bullshit" and a "mega fail," he instituted nightly meetings, seven days a week, to rigorously apply first principles. He justified the pace by framing the work's importance.

This is critical for all human destiny. It's hard to change destiny. You can't do it from nine to five.

Elon believes in being a "frontline general," comparing his presence at factories and problem areas to Napoleon on the battlefield. He thinks troops are more motivated when they see their general in the fight. He also reuses ideas that work. For instance, lessons from using toys like model cars and Legos to understand precision manufacturing for cars are now being applied to building Tesla's Optimus robots. He frames this new project with grand significance, stating its goal is to create "a future of abundance, a future where there is no poverty. It really is a fundamental transformation of civilization."

Elon Musk believes that technological progress is not inevitable; it can stop or even backslide. Progress only happens if people work very hard to make it happen. This belief drives his sense of urgency.

The future will not get here fast enough unless we force it.

When working on the robo-taxi, he told his team they were creating a historically mega-revolutionary product. He then spent hours each week with the team designing each station on the manufacturing line, shaving milliseconds off each step. While a millisecond might seem insignificant today, it makes a huge difference when manufacturing tens of millions of units. This illustrates his principle of starting with the end in mind, viewing tiny improvements today as massive improvements over time.

Upon acquiring Twitter, Elon encountered a completely opposite company culture. Twitter was a friendly place where "coddling was considered a virtue," offering permanent work-from-home options and monthly mental rest days. A common buzzword was "psychological safety." Elon found this idea laughable, considering it the enemy of urgency and progress. His preferred term was "hardcore discomfort," which he saw as a weapon against complacency. He immediately began making changes. When an engineer in charge of the Explore page said he'd make a requested fix on Monday, he was told to do it immediately. The engineer later expressed appreciation for this decisiveness after years of inaction on new features.

Elon also implemented his core belief that product design should be driven by engineers. He insists that product managers must understand code.

Product managers who don't know anything about coding keep ordering up features they don't know how to create. This is like Cavalry generals who don't know how to ride a horse. You must stay as close to the actual work as possible. Do not separate yourself from the pain of your decisions.

He operates with the motto, "if a timeline is long, it's wrong." His approach results in epic accomplishments and failures alike.