50 Takeaways from ‘Elon Musk’ - on life, work and a ‘final warning’

Review

“Elon Musk” is not just Isaacson’s best but perhaps one of the best business books of all time with enduring lessons. One, he got almost unlimited access to Elon and team for two years. Two, Elon! Three, a fascinating case of embracing Risk-with-capital-R as not something to avoid (“do no harm”), not something to optimize (risk-reward analysis) but something to warmly embrace and overcome with will, “surge” and first-principle driven engineering.

The book has essentially three broad parallel themes often intertwined in narratives -

Relationship — Family and friends — relationship and evolution of it with Elon’s parents, grandparents of both sides, kids, spouses/SOs, siblings — especially Kimbal, cousins and a handful of business friends including some employees in both Tesla and SpaceX.

Results — Zip2/Paypal, EVs, SolarRoof, Rockets/NASA, Neuralink, Hyperloop, Twitter — workspaces where Elon ventured and revolutionized them.

Regulating Principles — This is where Isaacson has done a masterful job. He observed, probed and eked out a set of rules that Elon follows — with himself, with how he gets work done, with other people.

As someone who’s worked (“hardcore”ly, if I may) in Tesla during famed “Production Hell” and was lucky to witness several of the events mentioned — e.g., 5000th car of the week, a black Model 3, coming out of factory on June 30, 2018 at 2 AM-ish — Isaacson’s description of Tesla, and its mission-driven culture, is accurate, though as a genuine believer in that mission, seemed awfully short. Some of Elon’s brilliant “management emails” deserved a mention — e.g., how not/to communicate (no abbreviations; hierarchy agnostic), how to/not meet (get out if you are adding no value), how to set goals (Hofstadder’s law — set it so ambitious that even missing it by 50% would still get it done twice as fast had it not been set so) etc. Plus, Elon is always highly readable, and succinct.

To bridge to standard practices of management, as it is followed in most western world today, the author follows up with most people after they had “interesting pushbacks” from Elon, mostly when they either did not have an answer and did not say they did not know, or when — simply — Elon was thinking far ahead of them, and thinking multi-threaded to not offer much of “contextual relevance”. The emphasis on “small teams with right individuals will always outcompete large teams” is spot on and is essentially why Autopilot is successful with 150 engineers and Twitter was awfully slow moving with few thousands.

Final third of the book was often observed and written in first person. The author was present in many of those events. But that takes a little bit away from the velocity of the book and perhaps adds 50–60 more pages that merely repeat the themes already established, with apt narratives, earlier in the book. Moving Twitter’s 5000 servers from Sacramento data center to Portland — first thought to take months till Elon diverted his jet, landed in Sacramento, opened an air vent with a (borrowed) utility knife, went underneath the rack and essentially did a “POC” — is one such example. It was an interesting read, especially for an engineer, irrespective.

No single individual in last 100 years, perhaps, did change things more for “humanity as a macro”. “Elon Musk” is the best way to understand him and is a brilliant, captivating read. The grand theme of the book, to me, was as Elon was quoted — “This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.”

This is not just a book on Elon Musk. This is a book to look at risk with a fundamentally different world-, or should I say ‘cosmic-’, view.

Fifty-ish Takeaways

1. Cosmic View — “”other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view.”
2. Risk as AutoPilot of Life — “Elon wants risk for its own sake,” says Peter Thiel, who became his partner in the early days of PayPal. “He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it.”
   “It’s a big theme for him to never have his decisions guided by fear,”
   “Entrepreneurs are actually not risk takers. They’re risk mitigators. They don’t thrive on risk, they never seek to amplify it, instead they try to figure out the controllable variables and minimize their risk.” But not Musk. “He was into amplifying risk and burning the boats so we could never retreat from it.” — Roelof Botha”
   …but do the math — “We’re going to be doing dumb things, but let’s just not do dumb things on a large scale”
3. Escape Hatch — Reading remained Musk’s psychological retreat, and ‘looking into future’ was coping mechanism for intense stress.
4. Reading Recommendation — “I do not recommend reading Nietzsche as a teenager,” he says. Fortunately, he was saved by science fiction.”
   “Foundation Series & Zeroth Law are fundamental to creation of SpaceX.”
   The single-minded passion of the superheroes impressed him.
5. Experience teaches us wisdom of ignorance — ““There are no atheist pilots”
6. First Principles — “essence of being an engineer, he felt, was to address any problem by drilling down to the most fundamental tenets of physics.”
7. Why Silicon Valley pivoted from hardware to software — Originally, hardware could be opened, inspected, tinkered. However, after Jobs’ “trend toward closed and sealed devices meant that most techies who came of age in the 1990s gravitated to software more than hardware.” Why Silicon Valley went from hardware to software revolution!
8. Management Philosophy 1 — “It’s not your job to make people on your team love you,” he said at a SpaceX executive session years later. “In fact, that’s counterproductive.”
9. Management Philosophy 2 — Shorten Feedback Loop — “people on the assembly line should be able to immediately collar a designer or engineer and say, ‘Why the fuck did you make it this way?’ 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 will take you longer to do something.” Engineers sit together with everyone else.
10. Product Philosophy — “True product people have a compulsion to sell directly to consumers, without middlemen muddying things up.”
11. Mission >> Money — “What I didn’t appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order to make it work financially,”
12. On America — “The United States is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. This is a land of adventurers.”
13. On Drive — “They think that technology just automatically improves. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.”
14. Russia Visit pre SpaceX — “….calculated the weight of the food and the weight of the vodka, and they were roughly equal”
15. Key Metric, SpaceX — boost for the buck — “what it cost to get each pound of payload into orbit”..focus resulted in “increasing the thrust of the engines, reducing the mass of the rockets, and making them reusable”.
    Idiot Index — “cost of a product divided by cost of all components”. The higher the idiot index, the more opportunity to optimize manufacturing to scale it. Related to First Principles.
16. Network Theory 101 — “Personal networks are more complex than digital ones.”
17. Operating Principle #1 — “A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle,”
18. Operating Principle #2 — The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a mere recommendation.
19. Operating Principle #3 — “Success is not guaranteed, but excitement is!”
20. Operating Principle #4 — “Pretend we are a startup about to run out of money”
21. Right-shift Unknown Unknowns — “It’s not how well you avoid problems,” Mueller says. “It’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.”
22. Don’t outsource your destiny — “..most important decision that Elon Musk made about Tesla..was that it should make its own key components, rather than piecing together a car with hundreds of components from independent suppliers.” Helped survive Pandemic Supply Chain crisis.
23. Design aesthetic — “The lights are like the eyes of a car, and you have to have beautiful eyes.”
24. Employee Onboarding — (in a remote pacific atoll, SpaceX employees) “Each time a newbie stayed overnight, they were awarded a T-shirt imprinted with the mantra “Outsweat, Outdrink, Outlaunch.”
25. Singular Ownership == Accountability (often known as ‘one horse, one feeder, or the horse dies of starvation’) — “Musk has a rule about responsibility: every part, every process, and every specification needs to have a name attached.”
26. Process — “Designing a car is easy, difficult part is manufacturing it. It’s not the product that leads to success. It’s the ability to make the product efficiently. It’s about building the machine that builds the machine.”
27. Utilitarian Management — “Wanting to be everyone’s friend leads you to care too much about the emotions of the individual in front of you rather than caring about the success of the whole enterprise — an approach that can lead to a far greater number of people being hurt.”
28. Steve vs. Elon, from Larry Ellison- “Steve just had to get the conception and software right, but the manufacturing was outsourced. Elon took on the manufacturing, the materials, the huge factories.”
29. “Hardcore”, the definition and the why — “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.”
30. Focus on what’s at stake — “A fully reusable rocket is the difference between being a single-planet civilization and being a multiplanet one.”
31. Insight behind Hyperloop — “Did you ever notice that cities are built in 3-D, but the roads are only built in 2-D? You could build roads in 3-D by building tunnels under cities.”
32. Stoicism — “…way of dealing with his mental problems, he says when I ask, “is just take the pain and make sure you really care about what you’re doing.”
33. “The Goal”, rephrased and far more real-time — (Tesla, Fremont) “….green and red lights at the stations…, so Musk was able to walk the floor and home in on trouble spots. His team called it “walk to the red.”
34. Decisions, Accuracy- vs. Precision- of at Scale — “on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor. “At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later,” he said. “But if I don’t make decisions, we die.”
35. Engineering Managers — “All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time coding.” Otherwise, it’s “like a cavalry captain who can’t ride a horse!”
36. “Algorithm”, Manufacturing Process —
    1. Question EVERY requirement
    2. Delete ANY part or process you can. If you did not add 10% of these back, you did not delete enough.
    3. Simplify & Optimize
    4. Accelerate Cycle Time
    5. Finally, automate
37. Errors — “It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong.”
38. Depth-first Communication — “Whenever there are problems to solve, don’t just meet with your managers. Do a skip level, where you meet with the level right below your managers.”
39. Hiring/Promoting — When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant….When promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills.
40. People Leaving, Org Atrophy — Musk is usually not sentimental about people leaving. He likes fresh blood. He is more concerned with a phenomenon he calls “phoning in rich” — no longer hungry.
41. Future, Big Question on — “Why doesn’t the future look like the future?” — Saxon Musk, 17
42. Zoom out to The REAL Big Picture, regularly — “Every week, amid all the technical meetings on engine and rocket design, he held one very otherworldly meeting called “Mars Colonizer.””
43. “Surges”, Operating Mechanism — ‘an all-hands-on-deck 24/7 frenzy to produce an outcome by a deadline that was artificial and unrealistic’. Irrespectively, often met nearly close enough. Many examples, including 5K cars/week.
44. Bezos vs. Musk — “Bezos was methodical. His motto was gradatim ferociter, or “Step by step, ferociously.” Musk’s instinct was to push and surge and drive people toward insane deadlines, even if it meant taking risks.”
45. Legacy, in own words — “Building mass-market electric cars was inevitable. It would have happened without me. But becoming a space-faring civilization is not inevitable.”
46. Gates, on Musk — “You can feel whatever you want about Elon’s behavior, but there is no one in our time who has done more to push the bounds of science and innovation than he has.”
47. Drive — “I’ve been burning the candle at both ends with a flamethrower for a very long time”
48. Cost vs. Value — “…a Coke that costs too much, like in an amusement park, does not taste as good.”
49. Team Size — “I’m a big believer that a small number of exceptional people who are highly motivated can do better than a large number of people who are pretty good and moderately motivated”. Small group of really great generalist engineers can outperform a regular group 100x larger.
50. Final Warning — “This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.”