The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

Metadata

• Title: The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success
• Author: Eric Jorgenson and Naval Ravikant
• Book URL: https://amazon.com/dp/B0GFXKWVBK?tag=malvaonlin-20
• Open in Kindle: kindle://book/?action=open&asin=B0GFXKWVBK
• Last Updated on: Tuesday, April 7, 2026

Highlights & Notes

Hard work is common, intelligence uncommon, courage rare—and Elon combusts all three.

As Chief Engineer, Elon reminds us that building value is building things, not financing or managing them.

Wealth, as the physicist David Deutsch wrote, is the set of physical transformations that we can effect—true for both individuals and societies. The main component of wealth is knowledge, not capital. By creating new knowledge, and then instantiating it in products that are duplicated and distributed, Elon and his fellow entrepreneurs are engines of wealth creation and distribution.

If your motives are pure and greater than yourself, the world will conspire in its subtle ways to help you.

Reject the craving for comfort and social approval. Reorient to the optimism of youth. Leave those talking and dividing, and get on the path to learning and building.

Don’t make the thing to make the money, make the money so that you can make the thing. Don’t get paid for work, get paid so that you can do your best work.

“All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.” —Ernest Rutherford1

I don’t mind if my legacy is accurate or inaccurate, as long as I die feeling I’ve done the right thing for the future of Consciousness.

It’s possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.

The measure of success in my life is: “How many useful things can I get done?”

Try to be useful. Do useful things for your fellow human beings and the world. It’s hard to be useful, to contribute more than you consume. Can you have a positive net contribution to society? Aim for that.

If you aspire to do true work, your probability of success is much higher.10 For any product you’re trying to create, ask yourself the utility improvement compared to the current state of the art, multiplied by how many people it would affect.

This is the same advice I give to my own children: “Follow your heart in terms of what you find interesting or fulfilling to do.”14 I hope they will work extremely hard and become productive contributors to society. I’m also hopeful they will do things like engineering, writing books, or just in some way, adding more than they take from the world.

useful life is worth having lived.

Fight for the Future Fight for the things that make you excited about the future. The future will not get here fast enough unless we force

My core personal competence is technology. If something has to be designed or invented and you must ensure the value of the thing you create is greater than the cost of the inputs—that’s my core skill.

Doing something I enjoy, which is useful for other people—that gives me satisfaction.

Don’t start a company because you want to be an entrepreneur or because you want to make money. It is better to approach from this angle: What is a useful thing you could build that you wish existed in the world?31

just find things that need to happen, and try to make them happen. I thought these things needed to get done. If the money was lost, okay. It was still worth trying.

Try to find an overlap of your talents and what you’re interested in.

Try to find work that is a good combination of things you are inherently good at but also like doing.33 Then, try to get other people to work with you to create that thing. Keep making it better and better. If you create something useful, money will be the result. That’s the way a properly working economy rewards the creation of useful goods and services.

have an obsessive nature about the quality of the product.

It’s important to like whatever you’re doing. Life is too short to spend it doing something you don’t like.

We say the things we believe, even when sometimes those things we believe are delusional.

Around 1946–1948, when they first started making TVs, they did a famous nationwide survey: “Will you ever buy a TV?” and around 96 percent of respondents said, “No.”

The economy is a positive-sum game, a “grow the pie” situation. Those who assume the economy is zero-sum believe the only way to get ahead is by taking things from another.

I put a lot of stock in having a grow-the-pie mindset, not a zero-sum mindset.

It’s much better to work on adding to the economic pie. Create more than you consume.

With that said, I would say this to twenty-something me: I think there’s some merit to not being too intense, and enjoying the moment a bit. Occasionally stopping to smell the roses would probably be a good idea.

Look fear straight in the eye and it will disappear. The nature of fear is that people don’t look at it. Look at it directly and it will be gone.

First of all, I feel fear. It’s not as though I have the absence of fear. I feel it quite strongly. But when something is important enough and you believe in it enough, you do it in spite of fear. You shouldn’t think, “I feel fear about this and therefore I shouldn’t do it.” It’s normal to feel fear. If you don’t feel fear, you definitely have something mentally wrong. Just feel it and let the importance of your mission drive you to do it anyway.

We should not be afraid of doing something just because some amount of tragedy is likely to occur.

I think: “This is simply something important. It must get done. We will keep doing it or die trying.” I don’t need a source of strength for that. Quitting is not in my nature. I don’t care about optimism or pessimism. Fuck that. We’re going to get it done.

I try to be hyperrational. If the reasoning fits, and you’re not violating the laws of physics, that’s the thing you should try to do. These things just don’t seem that crazy to me.

Start somewhere. Then be prepared to question your assumptions, fix what you did wrong, and adapt to reality.

I am obsessed with truth. Obsessed.82 If you’re going to come up with a good solution, the truth is really, really important.

This obsession with truth is why I studied physics, because physics attempts to understand the truth of the universe. Physics is about finding the provable truths of the universe, and finding truths that have predictive power.

Physics is law. Everything else is a recommendation. I’ve met many people who can break the laws of man, but I have never met anyone who could break the laws of physics.

No matter how smart you are, you will make some number of mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s just a question of how many and how often.

In business and personal life, wishful thinking causes a lot of mistakes. You have to ask whether something is true or not. If something ever feels too easy or doesn’t quite make sense…it is probably wishful thinking.

Do you have the right fundamental axioms, or truths? Are they relevant? Are you making the right conclusions based on those truths? That’s the essence of critical thinking, and yet it is amazing how often people fail to do that. Wishful thinking is innate in the human brain. You want things to be the way you wish them to be, so you tend to filter out information you shouldn’t.92 That’s why I always assume we’re losing, even when it looks like we might win.

I would encourage people to use the mental tools of physics and apply them broadly in life. They are the best tools.

The normal way we conduct our lives is reasoning by analogy. That means we do something because it’s similar to something else, or what other people are doing. When you think this way, you only get slight iterations. It’s easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles, so that’s what we do most of the time.96 And in most of life, we should reason by analogy. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn’t be able to get through the day. It would be too much thinking.97 But for important things, that kind of thinking is too bound by convention or prior experiences. You will hear, “It’s always been done this way,” or “Nobody’s ever done it.” That is a ridiculous way to think. Don’t just follow the trends. You can avoid following trends by thinking with the physics approach, first principles. It’s a powerful, powerful method for life in general. Look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from there. Then see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work.98 It might or might not be different from what people have done in the past.

Q: How do you apply first-principles thinking? Break something down to the most fundamental principles. Start by asking: What am I most confident is true at a foundational level? That sets your axiomatic base. Then you reason up from there. Then you check your conclusions against the axiomatic truths. For instance, to approach any new technology problem, make sure you’re not violating physics with a first-principles analysis. A basic question in physics would be: Am I violating conservation of energy or momentum? If so, it’s not going to work. That’s just to establish if…

Q: How have you applied first-principles thinking to building companies? Here’s an example from early in building Tesla. People said battery packs were too expensive to make cheap electric cars. They assumed they would always be expensive, because they had been in the past. That’s pretty dumb. If you applied that reasoning to everything new, then you would never try anything new. “Oh, nobody wants a car. Horses are great; we’re used to them. They can eat grass. There’s lots of grass all over the place. There’s no gasoline available. So people will never buy gas cars.” People did say that, a lot. People assumed batteries for electric vehicles would always cost $600 per kilowatt hour. The first-principles approach to battery costs is this: What are the batteries made of? What are the materials that make up the batteries? What is the market value of those material constituents? It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation, and a steel can. Okay, what if we bought that amount of material at the London Metal Exchange? What would each of those…

What is simple in one arena is often profound…

First-principles thinking built SpaceX. Most people think, “Historically, all rockets have been expensive. Therefore, in the future, all rockets will be expensive.” But that’s not true.105 This is where it’s helpful to use the analytical approach again.106 The way we applied first-principles thinking to rocketry was asking, “What are the materials that go into a rocket?”107 A rocket is made from aluminum, titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Break it down further and ask, “How much of each material is used? Now, what is the cost of all these raw components?”108 If you have them stacked on the floor and could wave a magic wand to create the rocket, what would the cost of the rocket be? We imagine the cost of rearranging the atoms was zero.109 That’s going to set the floor of the cost of the rocket. I call this the “magic wand number,” the hypothetical best-case scenario. For rockets, that turned out to be a relatively small number, well under 5 percent of the current cost, in some cases closer to 1 or 2 percent.110 The manufacturing must be very inefficient if the raw material cost is only 1 or 2 percent of the finished product.

I call it “The Idiot Index.” How much more does a finished product cost than the cost of its materials? If a part or product had a high Idiot Index, we could cut the cost with more efficient manufacturing techniques.

The first-principles approach is a good way to figure out counterintuitive solutions. It was a helpful thing to learn.

Another good physics tool is thinking about things “in the limit.” Take a particular idea and imagine scaling it to a very large or very small number. How do things change?

Ever notice that cities are built in 3D, but roads are only built in 2D? You could build roads in 3D by building tunnels under cities.119 You can alleviate any amount of urban congestion with a 3D tunnel network.

When designing a product, people often start designing with the tools, parts, and methods they are familiar with. That’s their default. That will lead to a product that can be made with those tools and methods, but it is unlikely to be the perfect product.129 The other way to think is to imagine the platonic ideal of the perfect product or technology. What is the perfect arrangement of atoms that would be the best possible product? Now try to figure out how to get the atoms in that shape.130 Think through things in both directions. What can we build with the tools that we have? But also, what does the “theoretically perfect” product look like?131 The idea of the “theoretically perfect” product is going to be a moving target because as you learn more, the definition for that perfect product will change. You don’t actually know what the perfect product is, but you can approximate a more perfect product. Then ask, “What tools, methods, or materials do we need to create to get the atoms in that shape?” People rarely think this way. But thinking in limits is a powerful tool.

I encourage you to read a lot of books. Just read. Try to ingest as much information as you can.

Develop good general knowledge, so you at least have a rough “lay of the land” of the full knowledge landscape. Read a broad range of material. How can you know what you’re really interested in if you’re not at least doing a broad, light exploration of the knowledge landscape?142

It is important to view knowledge as a semantic tree. Make sure you understand the fundamental principles (the trunk and big branches) before you get into the leaves (the details), then there is something for them to hang on to.

Most people self-limit their ability to learn. It’s pretty straightforward—just read books and talk to people.

Talk to people from different walks of life, in different industries, professions, and skills. Try to learn as much as possible. Search for meaning.

Science is discovering the essential truths about what exists in the universe. Engineering is about creating things that have never existed before.

When there’s a rapid change in the rate of technology, engineering plays a pivotal role.

Play to win, or don’t play at all.

There is never a shortage of ideas. I find ideas to be somewhat trivial, but the execution of good ideas is extremely difficult. Prototypes are easy; production is hard. Production and being cash flow positive is excruciating pain. Product ideas are nearly irrelevant.

To those who quietly help advance the causes we mutually believe in, knowing advancing the cause is the only reward: thank you.

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

Given the options, I prefer to learn from success.

My goals were to engineer products by having a feel for the physics and to never work for a boss with a business degree.

One reason SpaceX could move so quickly is I made both the engineering decisions and the spending decisions together in one brain. In most companies, those decisions require at least two different people.

I’m making the engineering and spending decisions together with all the information in one place. My brain trusts itself.

To make the right decisions, you need to understand something at a detailed level.

If there was a crisis situation, I slept on the floor. Most of the time I did not sleep in a conference room because people could not see me in the conference room—I slept on the floor in the factory. Otherwise how would people know? They wouldn’t. Seeing is believing. I slept on the floor outside the conference room so they could see I was there.205 When the team is being asked to work super hard, I have to be right there with them and they have to see it. If I fall asleep in the middle of the factory floor at four in the morning and wake up four hours later, they see that. They are like, “If the CEO is willing to take that level of pain, I can do it too.”206 It was a world of hurt. I would wake up smelling like oil and iron filings. It was rough. But I was asking people to really go all out. I can’t expect them to go all out if I’m not doing the same.207

Think about war. Do you want the general in some ivory tower or on the front lines? The troops fight harder if they see the general on the front lines. Nobody bleeds for the prince in the palace. Get out there on the front line. Show them that you care and that you’re not in some plush office somewhere.208

Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do. Whatever the people at the front lines are doing, I try to do it at least a few times myself.210

This is why we eliminate all special privileges of executives. Everyone has equal access to parking, eating at the same tables, and there are no management offices. I am convinced that managers should work at the forefront, in the same work environment as the entire team. Even though I run a company, I still do not have my own office and often move my workplace to the most challenging area in the factory. Managers should always take care of their team before they take care of themselves. The supervisor is there to serve his team, not the other way round.211 All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20 percent of their time coding. Solar roof managers must spend time on the roofs doing installations. Otherwise, they are like a cavalry leader who can’t ride a horse or a general who can’t use a sword.212 Always be smashing your ego. Internalize responsibility. Whether you’re a CEO or any other role, do whatever it takes to succeed.213 A major failure mode is a high ego-to-ability ratio. If your ego-to-ability ratio gets too high, then you’ve broken the feedback loop to reality.214 In AI terms, you’ll break your reinforcement learning (RL) loop. You want to have a strong RL loop, which means internalizing responsibility and minimizing ego.215 Do whatever the task is, whether grand or humble.216

There is a great quote from Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”217

People say they’re worried about the damage of words. People worried about words have never been punched in the face. Once you’ve been punched in the face, real hard, right on the nose—you’ll take any words over that.228 Adversity shaped me. My pain threshold became very high.229

When starting a company, usually the beginning is fun. Then, it’s hellish for a number of years.230

“Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.” There’s some truth to that.231 “Staring into the abyss’” means you’re going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company. Most startups fail. It’s like 90 percent—it could be 99 percent of startups fail. You’re constantly saying, “If I don’t get this right, the company will die.” This can be quite stressful.232 “Eating glass” means you’ve got to work on the problems the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. You end up working on problems you wish you weren’t working on. That’s “eating glass,” and it goes on for a long time.233

There’s always going to be some amount of glass that has to be chewed. But it’s less and less as time goes by.234 If you don’t eat the glass, you’re not going to be successful.235

Failure is not good. Failure is bad. But if something is important enough, then you do it, even though the risk of failure is high. My advice for somebody who wants to start a company: Bear in mind, the most likely outcome is failure. Reconcile yourself to that strong possibility, and only if you still feel compelled to, do it.237 That said, many people fear starting a company too much. What’s the worst that could happen? You’re not gonna starve to death; you’re not gonna die of exposure—really, what’s the worst that could happen?238

The most important thing is to attract great people. Whether you are creating a company or joining a company, find an amazing group that you really respect.239

A company is just a bunch of people coming together to create a product or service. There’s no such thing as “a business,” just a group pursuing a goal.240 How talented and hardworking that group is, and the degree to which they are focused cohesively in a good direction, will determine the success of the company. If you’re creating a company, or if you’re joining a company, the most important thing is to attract great people.241 A company is essentially a cybernetic collective of people and machines. This collective is far smarter than an individual.242 That’s what a company is, and there are different levels of complexity in the way companies are formed.243

People sometimes forget a company is just a group of people gathered together to make products for fellow human beings. As long as they make great products, the company will have great value.245

Fundamentally, if you don’t have a compelling product at a compelling price, you don’t have a great company.250

I consider one of my core responsibilities as CEO is to have an environment where great engineers can flourish.251 I don’t think I manage smart people; they manage themselves. If someone is smart and talented, they can go anywhere and do anything, anytime.252 I say, “Look, this is the goal we’re after. Do you agree with this goal? If you do, then let’s try to get it done.”

Another important principle: You want everyone to be able to think like the chief engineer. They need to understand the system at a high level, well enough to know when they are making a bad optimization.254

If you’re able to get talented, hard-working people to join the company, work together, and have a relentless sense of perfection toward a common goal, you will end up with a great product. If you have a great product, lots of people will buy it, and the company will be successful.

A small group of technically strong people will always beat a large group of moderately strong people.257

At Tesla, a superb engineer’s talents are used to a greater degree than anywhere else.260

When hiring, I look for evidence of exceptional ability, or at least exceptional aspiration.

I always ask my teams to give a lot of thought to who should join. I recommend paying close attention to people who haven’t completed their grad or even undergrad, but are obviously brilliant. Better to have them join before they achieve a breakthrough.

In interviews, I ask people to tell me the story of their career and some of the tougher problems they dealt with, how they dealt with those, and how they made decisions at key transition points. Usually that’s enough for me to get a good gut feeling about someone. What I’m really looking for is evidence of exceptional ability. Did they face difficult problems and overcome them? Usually the person who had to struggle with the problem really understands it and they don’t forget if it was difficult. Ask them detailed questions about it, and they’ll know the answers. A person who was not responsible for that accomplishment will not know the details.267

Wherever the smartest, most driven people are choosing to work, that company is going to win.269 My philosophy for companies in the startup phase is a “Special Forces” approach. The minimum passing grade is excellent. I believe that’s the culture companies need to have if they’re going to become successful.270

Having a strong sense of purpose will attract the very best talent in the world. If the work is enjoyable, the financial rewards are good, and the product will change the world—that’s a pretty powerful set of motivators.274 I’ve made several hiring decisions where I valued intellect over heart and I think that was a mistake. I have tried to adjust accordingly. It matters whether somebody is a good person.275

If evil people hate you, you might be doing something right.276 When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.

Physics does not care about hurt feelings. It cares about whether you got the rocket right.277 All bad news should be given loudly and often. Good news can be said quietly and once.278

It’s not your job to make people on your team love you. In fact, that’s counterproductive. I had a manager who would not fire anyone. I told him, “You can’t tell people they have to get their shit together, and when they don’t get their shit together—nothing happens to them.”

I think it’s a real weakness to want to be liked. A real weakness. And I do not have that.281

In any product, you can see the errors in the organization’s structure. They will manifest themselves in the product. A major source of issues is poor communication between departments. The way to solve this is to allow free flow of information between all levels.

If, in order to get something done between departments, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then superdumb things will happen. Then the info has to flow back the other way again. This is incredibly dumb. Problems get solved quickly when a person just talks to a person in another department and makes the right thing happen. Anyone can and should talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission. You can talk directly to a VP in another department. You can talk to me. Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command.”

You can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission. Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens. Always view yourself as working for the good of the company and never your department.284

Managers should work hard to ensure they are not creating silos within the company that create an us-versus-them mentality or impede communication in any way. This is a natural tendency and needs to be actively fought.285

You can see the organizational boundaries in the product. You’ll often get a box in a box. You realize, “Why is this thing in two boxes?” Turns out, because both teams thought they needed an enclosure, the product ends up with an enclosure in an enclosure.

Find the design necessity of every part and every process.287

Connect designers and manufacturers to make sure they communicate often. The people on the assembly line should be able to immediately grab a designer or engineer and say, “WHY 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 about it.288 You cannot separate design, engineering, and manufacturing. They need to be together because you are going to make mistakes. You want to identify and fix those mistakes today, right now. And if you separate them, the mistakes will fester. Let the manufacturers put the designers’ hands on the stove too.289

Physically go to where the problem is, immediately.290 One of my rules is “Go as close to the source as possible.”

The most simple, straightforward, low-ego terms are generally best. You want to close the loop on reality hard.293

Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic.294 You have to always look at the incentive structure of an organization and ask, “Is that organization properly incentivizing innovation?”295 We’re looking for any possible action that can improve the probability of success, no matter how small. Whether that comes from an intern, me, or anyone else doesn’t matter.296 When trying new things, you’ve got to have some acceptance of failure…failure must be an option. If failure is not an option, it’s going to result in extremely conservative choices and you may get something even worse than lack of innovation—things may go backward.297

Let things evolve.299

It must be culturally acceptable to make false moves.300

If you punish people too much for failure, then they will respond accordingly, and the innovation you get will be incremental. Nobody’s going to try anything bold for fear of getting fired or being punished in some way. If you expect innovation, the compensation structure must reflect that. The risk-reward must favor taking bold moves.302 Failure is a side effect of iteration. I once told a discouraged engineer, “If you can’t tell me the four ways you fucked something up before you got it right, you weren’t the one doing the real work.”303 If we’re not occasionally blowing up an engine on the test stand, we’re not trying hard enough.304

Never use a cruise missile to kill a fly; just use a flyswatter.310

The number of lines of code is not a figure of merit. I consider a large number of lines of code to be bad, not good. I would award one point for adding a line of code and two points for deleting a line of code.312

Simplicity is our mantra. It creates both reliability and low cost.314

The best part is no part. The best process is no process.316

It’s a lot of minimizing things that can go wrong and maximizing the efficiency of the simple things.318 If you’ve got a whole bunch of separate parts and each of them has a given tolerance—even if that tolerance is tight, like 0.2 millimeter tolerance—but if you’ve got fifty parts…you have to multiply the variances together. You’ll end up with a huge variance between cars. That’s one of the reasons it’s better to combine parts rather than have more individual parts.

It’s way better to have a single piece, casted. Then you have no gaps, no sealant, no dissimilar metals.

You want fewer things, not more.322 It’s easy to say “simplify,” but it’s very difficult to do it.323

I have everyone at my companies rigorously implement a five-step process for engineering. I call it The Algorithm. I’ll list the steps, then explain. The order is very important. Make your requirements less dumb. Try very hard to delete the part or process. Simplify or optimize. Accelerate. Automate.

The first step is to question the requirements, and make your requirements less dumb. You have to start there, because otherwise you could get the perfect answer to the wrong question. This step makes the question the least wrong possible. Your requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because you’re less likely to question them. Always question requirements, even if it came from me. Everyone is wrong some of the time.

If you’re not adding deleted things back in 10 percent of the time, you’re clearly not deleting enough. Somewhat illogically, people often feel they’ve succeeded if they are not forced to put anything back in. But actually they have failed in a different way, because they’ve been overly conservative and have left things in there that shouldn’t be.

People tend to remember, with sometimes a jarring level of pain, when they deleted something they later needed. They overcorrect, and put too much stuff in there, which overcomplicates things. I tell them this in advance: “Look, we’re deliberately going to delete more than we should. Some of the things we delete, we’re going to put back in. At least one in ten things, we’re going to add back in.” People get a little shook by that. But if you’re so conservative in deleting that you never have to put anything back in, you obviously have a lot of stuff that isn’t needed. So, you’ve got to overcorrect for that tendency.

Please go ultrahardcore on deletion and simplification.” We put immense effort into reducing mass. There’s a recursive factor to mass. If you add an extra ton of heat shielding, you also need more fuel to get it to orbit, and you need more fuel to deorbit, and you need more fuel to land it. Also the structure now has more load on it, because it’s carrying an extra ton of heat shield. This applies to any given ton.

Recapping so far: Step one, make your requirements less dumb. Step two, try hard to delete the part or process.327 Then, once you have deleted as much as you can, the third step is to simplify or optimize. The third step. The third step. Not the first step. Why? The most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize a thing that should not exist.

Then, and only then, step four: accelerate cycle time. Once you’re moving in the right direction, and moving efficiently…you’re moving too slow. Go faster. You can always make things go faster. But, do not go faster until you have worked on the other three things first. I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. Speeding up something that shouldn’t exist is absurd. If you’re digging your grave, don’t dig it faster. Stop digging. Step five, the final step, is to automate. The big mistake I made in the Tesla factories in Nevada and Fremont was trying to automate every step too early. To fix that, we had to tear hundreds of expensive robots out of the production line. We put a hole in the side of the building just to remove all that equipment.328 Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts—before you introduce automation.329

A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle.330 Don’t Waste Time Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Get rid of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case, keep them short. Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved. Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave; it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.

The only true currency is time.331

The power of speed is underappreciated as a competitive factor.332 The real way you actually achieve intellectual property (IP) protection is by innovating fast. If your rate of innovation is high, then you don’t need to worry about protecting the IP because other companies will be copying something you did years ago. That’s fine. Just make sure your rate of innovation is fast. Speed of innovation is what matters.333 We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do so with intelligence and agility.334 A factory moving at twice the speed of another factory is basically equivalent to two factories. The company will succeed if it can do with one factory what takes other companies two, three, or four factories. We try to think, “How can we make each factory produce what would normally require five or even ten factories?”335 I have a running triage of what I do at each company, constantly thinking, “What is the most useful thing I could do?”336 In early SpaceX, I told the team everything we did was a function of our burn rate. We were burning through a hundred thousand dollars per day. In the same way, I expected the revenue in ten years to be ten million dollars a day. Every day we were slower to achieve our goals was a day of missing out on that revenue.337

Tesla is getting to the point where every high-quality minute of thinking has a million-dollar impact. That is insane. If Tesla is doing $2billionaweekinrevenue,that’sabout$300 million a day, seven days a week. There are many instances where a half-hour meeting improved the company’s financial outcome by $100 million.339

Everything is measured in terms of time. What is the time risk associated with something? The one thing you cannot replace is time.340

Avoid serialized dependencies. A lot of things have a “gestation period” and there is nothing you can do to accelerate it. If you can have all those things gestating in parallel, that will substantially accelerate your overall timeline. People tend to serialize too much. Put as many gestating elements in parallel as possible.342 If a timeline is long, it’s wrong.343 Break Down the “Impossible” The general principles of first-principle thinking apply to software, hardware, anything really. Often, we were told something was impossible, but once we broke it down into its constituent elements, we could solve those.344

Set Aggressive Timelines I often tell the Tesla team: “It’s okay to scrap equipment or money. It’s not okay to scrap time.”347

For internal timelines, we set the most aggressive timelines we can. I do this because there’s a kind of “law of gaseous expansion” for schedules. Whatever time you set, it’s not going to be less than that. It’s rare that something will ever get done faster than the schedule.349

The Real Work Some people have an absurd view of the economy as a magic thing that just produces stuff. They think goods and services magically come from somewhere, and if somebody has more stuff than somebody else, it’s because they took more from this magic source of stuff.359 Now, let me break it to the fools out there. If we don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff. If we don’t grow the food, process the food, and transport the food…there’s no food. Medical treatments, getting your teeth fixed, everything. There’s no stuff if we don’t make stuff. Some people have become detached from reality. This notion that the government can just send checks out to everybody and everything will be fine is not true—obviously. You can’t just legislate money to solve things. If you don’t make stuff, there is no stuff. The whole machine could grind to a halt.360

Somebody has to do the real work.

The biggest epiphany I had building Tesla is what really matters is the machine that builds the machines—the factory.364

Our success or failure will not be because of competition. It will be our capability to make a high-quality product at a price people can afford.367

It’s the same thing for cars. It’s easy to make a car prototype; it’s hard to do car production.370 This is underappreciated. People think there is a “eureka” moment where you come up with an idea and that’s it. They believe design is the hard part and production is just making copies. That’s completely false.371 At Tesla, we learned a valuable lesson. The production line will move as fast as the slowest and least lucky part of the entire production line. Let’s say there are ten thousand things that have to go right for production to work. If you have 9,999 things working and one that isn’t, that sets the production rate.372

We built the rockets first and the factory later, because building the production system is the harder thing.375 Design is overrated, and manufacturing is underrated. There is 1,000 percent, maybe 10,000 percent more work that goes into the production system than the product itself.376 Especially for a product with new technology. The difficulty of manufacturing is proportionate to the amount of new technology in the product.377

Prototypes are easy and fun. Reaching volume production with a reliable product at an affordable price is excruciatingly difficult.380

You want to embark on something where success is certain to be one of the possible outcomes.382

Money is like a database for guiding people to decide what they should do. You can think of banks as a set of databases.428

Think of money as information. People often think money has power in and of itself. It does not. Money is just information. Money is a database for resource allocation across time and space.

It’s important to take feedback from your environment. If we hadn’t responded to what people said, we probably would not have been successful. It’s important to look for things like that, focus on them, and correct your prior assumptions. You want to close those loops as quickly and clearly as possible.436 I’m trying to create an accurate mental model of reality. If I have a wrong view on something, or if there’s a nuanced improvement that can be made, I say, “I used to think this, which turned out to be wrong—thank goodness I don’t have that wrong belief anymore.”437 I’m a huge believer in taking feedback.

Better to pick a path and keep moving than just vacillate endlessly on a decision.

Pay close attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. It’s incredibly helpful. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does it.441

PayPal was a perfect case for viral marketing. Like Hotmail, one customer would be like a salesperson for you, bringing other customers. Customers would send money to a friend and bring that friend into the network. We had this exponential growth, where the more customers we had, the faster it grew. It was like bacteria in a petri dish, following an S-curve.450 We started off first by offering people twenty dollars if they opened an account and twenty dollars if they referred anyone. Then we dropped it to ten dollars. Then we dropped it to five dollars. As the network got bigger and bigger, the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot that we could offer.451 We probably spent $60or$70 million in incentives to build that network. That seems like a lot, but it built a very valuable network. The relative cost depends on your scale. That’s a peanut to Google.

Life is too short for long-term grudges.459

I could go and buy one of the islands of the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and create a new company. I haven’t spent my winnings. I’m going to put almost all of it back into a new game.463

You can find some small number of people that will disagree with anything.

When you have a big technology change, it tends to come from new companies.481

It was just a flat-out burning dumpster fire of stupidity. One example: The chassis had to be redesigned to fit the battery pack and became 40 percent heavier. This invalidated the crash testing Lotus had done.494

The most important thing is to start somewhere, be prepared to question your assumptions, fix what you did wrong, and adapt to reality.497

I never wanted to be a CEO, but I learned you could not truly be the chief technology or product officer unless you were the CEO.500

have a habit of biting off more than I can chew and just sitting there with chipmunk cheeks.504

The first version of a product has both a new-technology problem and a low-volume problem. You want to make your mistakes at a small scale, work the bugs out of the system, then reach for scale.506 With a new product, the first thing engineers try to do is make it work. After you make it work, then you optimize and optimize and optimize.507

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The idea is to drive to mass market as rapidly as possible, at the pace technology matures.511

If you have a new technology, the right place to enter is high unit-cost, low unit-volume.512

When a new cell phone or a new laptop comes out, they tend to be expensive at first, because they’re figuring out the issues and it takes time to optimize. Over time, with scale, that new technology becomes cheaper and cheaper.514

When you put your blood, sweat, and tears into creating something, building something important—it’s like a child. Which one will I let starve to death? I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So, I split the money between the two.519

Prioritizing has usually been out of desperation, not selection. It’s not, “Oh, let’s sit back and leisurely decide how we shall spend these resources.” It’s, “This isn’t working, if we don’t make it work, we’re gonna go bankrupt, so we better make it work.”

I felt like Indiana Jones running through the temple. There’s a huge boulder chasing you and you need to jump across a giant pit in the ground. If you slow down, the boulder will crush you, and if you don’t make the leap, you’ll die in the pit. That’s prioritizing.528

The best way to experience service is, of course, to not need service.537 If we charge for something, it is not because we want to make things more expensive; it’s because we can’t figure out how to make it less expensive.538

The value of beauty and inspiration is underrated, no question.542

Most people don’t consciously notice the small details, but they do subconsciously. Your mind takes in an overall impression. You know if something is appealing or not, even though you may not be able to point out exactly why. That sense is a summation of many details. Most of us experience this as “that’s ugly,” or “that’s beautiful,” or “wow, that’s elegant,” but can’t break down why.545 You can train yourself. You can make yourself pay attention to “why.” You can learn to bring subconscious awareness into conscious awareness. Look closely and carefully. Look at each object’s geometry.546 Pay attention to the little details. Train yourself to notice them. Notice the nuances of design, shape, form, function, and the way it looks in different lights. Anyone can do this, although it is a double-edged sword, because then you always notice all the little things. Now when something’s off—even a little thing—it drives me bananas. If you’re trying to make a perfect product, attention to detail is essential.547

One way to look at technology is like rendering an image in successive levels of detail. The first layer of the image is very blurry and things are out of place. Then with the next pass, it gets a bit more defined and things start to shift into place. And you do another pass and another pass, and eventually it’s refined and actually works.550 It generally takes three major iterations of any major new technology to have it work really, really well.551

Focus on signal over noise. A lot of companies get confused. They spend a lot of money on things that don’t actually make the product better.

“Are the efforts we’re expending resulting in a better product or service?” If they’re not, stop those efforts.558 Also, go for extreme levels of precision. One of the examples we use at Tesla is LEGO blocks. LEGO is super precise. The press-fit comes down to a quarter millimeter or less, and each one is exactly the same. LEGO doesn’t work if the press-fit is too soft or too hard. If it’s too soft, the press-and-click won’t stick; if it’s too hard, you can’t get it on. They can make something that is a tiny fraction of a millimeter accurate and it’s a low-cost plastic toy. If LEGO can be that precise, so can a car.559

It also helps to stay focused on our mission. Tesla’s motivation remains to make electric transport as affordable as possible. That informs all our actions.563 We put all our money and effort into trying to make the product as compelling as possible. The way to sell any product is through word of mouth. The key is to have a product people love. People will talk about the things they love.564 That generates real word of mouth, and that’s how our sales have grown. We’re not spending money on advertising, public relations, or endorsements. Anyone who buys our car bought it because they like the car, not their impression of the car.565 Tesla does not advertise or pay for endorsements. Instead, we use that money to make the product great.566

Building mass-market electric cars was inevitable. It would have happened without me. But becoming a space-faring civilization is not inevitable.577

I’ve always been optimistic. If I wasn’t optimistic, I wouldn’t be attempting all these crazy things. I must be pathologically optimistic, I suppose.578

There must be things to inspire us—that make you proud to be a member of humanity.585

The United States is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. It’s fundamental to the psyche. Once people realized, “There is a way to do this,” we got a lot of support.587

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.588 When I started them, I guessed both SpaceX and Tesla each had a probability of less than 10 percent to succeed. I don’t look at ideas and ask, “What is the rank-ordered list of best business opportunities from a financial standpoint?” I look for problems that are important to fix for people now and for the future to be good.

We must be optimistic. There’s no point in being pessimistic. It just doesn’t help. My theory is you’d rather be optimistic and wrong about the future than pessimistic and right. If you’re pessimistic, you’re going to be miserable. Might as well enjoy the journey.594

If you’re trying to convince the public to do something, you have to think about what will excite people. What message are we going to try to convey? What will people respond to? What would I respond to if I was an objective member of the public?

People tend to respond to precedents and superlatives.

I’m a big believer in this: Don’t ask investors to invest their money if you’re not prepared to invest your money. It doesn’t seem right to me to ask other people to invest if you don’t also invest. I’d rather lose my money than any of my friends’ money or investors’ money.606

How could the Russians build low-cost rockets? It’s not like we drive Russian cars, fly Russian planes, or have Russian kitchen appliances. The US is a pretty competitive place, and we should be able to build a cost-efficient launch vehicle.612

Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.615

When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.

I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.632

You Have to Blow Things Up The first goal is to make the damn thing work—we’ll optimize it later.

There was risk-reward asymmetry. If you make a change and something goes wrong, big punishment. If you make a change and it goes right, small reward.

We don’t want to design to eliminate every risk. Otherwise, we will never get anywhere.646 Before every Starship launch, we go through the list of risks we predict, which we call the “risk list.” If you look at various reasons why we blew up, none of the reasons they blew up were on our “risk list.” There’s a crazy amount of new technology, all evolving simultaneously. We need time and trials to iron out the unknown unknowns.647

Eliminate what isn’t necessary to solve the key problem.650

We’re just a bunch of monkeys. How did we even get this far? It beats me. We were swinging through the trees eating bananas not long ago.655 Can you imagine if human civilization continued at the current pace of technological advancement for another million years? Where would we be?

But you can’t take a single example and make an entire theory out of it.658

The first step is to establish that something is possible, then the probability it will occur.660

But, we’re not breaking any laws of physics. This is possible.681

There must be things you’re excited about, that you’re glad to be alive for.

There is something special—far more rewarding than money—about working with an epic team to make breakthroughs.690

I can’t emphasize this enough: As long as we push hard and are not complacent, the future is going to be great.691

If you care about the reality of goodness instead of the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult. If philanthropy is acting from a love of humanity—my companies are philanthropy.692

But generally, if there’s a way to fix something within the market system, building a company is the better way to do it. Sometimes there isn’t or there are complications to it.693 If it’s possible to solve a problem with a profitable venture then that’s the best thing to do. In the grand scheme of things, there are a few failures in the market that have to be addressed with a nonprofit. There are some, but not many.

My fundamental intent is to improve the probability of the future being good. SpaceX and Tesla will do more good for humanity than anything I could do with philanthropy. It is difficult to give away money effectively if you care about the money actually doing good, not merely having the perception of doing good.696

I care about reality. Perception be damned.

I don’t disrupt something for the sake of disrupting it. My focus is making a product that improves quality of life for people.

If the output is more valuable than the inputs, that creates a profit. Profit shows you have a useful company. But in a high-growth scenario, you need a lot more inputs for future output, so for a while you have negative cash flow and lack of profitability, which we had early on at Tesla. In the long term, of course, that has to be fixed. There can’t be a negative cash flow in the long term.

If you create a company that produces products and services better than what existed before, wealth is created. If you have some ownership in that company, wealth accrues to you. Doing good work gives you the right to allocate more capital.

Sometimes people equate wealth with consumption, but they’re obviously not the same thing. Consumption is fun, but capital allocation is a job.

Profit just means people are paying you more for whatever you’re creating than you’re spending to create it. That’s a good thing. If that’s not the case, you’ll soon be out of business, and rightfully so, because you’re not adding enough value.

If you create great products and services that create wealth, that should be applauded. You increased the standard of living of the country and perhaps of the world.

Work on things that you find interesting, fulfilling, and that contribute some good to the rest of society.

The final thing I would encourage you to do is to take risks. Especially before you have kids and other obligations. As you get older, your obligations start to increase. Once you have a family, taking risks affects not just yourself, but your family as well. It gets harder to do things that might not work out. It is easiest to start before you have those obligations. Take risks now, and do something bold. You won’t regret

Go do it. Just go out there and do it. People are far too afraid to try. Fear is the biggest reason for failure. Don’t be afraid to fail. Just go.727 If you don’t push for radical breakthroughs, you’re not going to get radical outcomes.

Some people think technology automatically gets better every year. It does not. It only gets better if smart people work like crazy to make it better. We need strong engineering talent applied to problems. That’s how any technology actually gets better. If people don’t work on technology, it actually will decline.

I want to caution against complacency. If we are not complacent, and we have a high sense of urgency, things will be fine.

If you want the future to be good, you must make it so. Take action to make it good, and it will be.733

AI and robotics will bring about what might be termed “the age of abundance.” Other people have used this word, and that is my prediction: It will be an age of abundance for everyone.

People get confused sometimes; they think an economy is money. Money is just a database. The actual economy is stuff. Goods and services. What limits the output of goods and services? The limiter is labor. Even capital is distilled labor, so the limiting factor for the economy is labor.

The internet is a great leveler for information and education. You can learn anything online for free.

You’re already digitally superhuman.

Your brain has to work to compress a bunch of concepts in your head into this incredibly low data rate format called speech or typing. That’s what language is—a compression algorithm on thought, to transfer a concept. Then it’s got to listen and decompress what’s coming in. Both of these steps are very lossy.

Conceivably, there’s a way to have a digital layer of your brain feel like part of you. It’s not something you offload to consciously; it’s just “you.”

Don’t worry about it. I mean, worry about it. Because if you worry about it, ironically, it will be okay. It will be a self-unfulfilling prophecy.

Not starving to death would have been the primary goal of most people throughout history. Just making sure they had enough food to last through the winter and not freeze to death.

If you judge history from what is morally acceptable today, you’d give everyone a failing grade. I don’t think anyone would get a passing grade in morality if you look back to even three hundred years ago.

We see patterns for civilizations as they go through a life cycle, like an organism does. A human is a zygote, fetus, baby, toddler, teenager, eventually gets older, and dies. Every civilization goes through a life cycle. No civilization will last forever.

The birth rate might be the biggest single threat to the future of human civilization. Artificial intelligence (AI) gone wrong is a big concern. Religious extremism is a concern. There are quite a few important problems to solve.

We want to prioritize avoiding civilizational risks over things that are painful and tragic on a local level, but are not civilizational risks.

Something must stop the cycle of reciprocal violence. Something must stop it or it will never stop. Just eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, limb for a limb, life for a life, forever and ever.

recommend reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. The premise is protecting society through a dark age. My guess is there will be another dark age at some point.

Asimov’s Zeroth Law: Take the set of actions most likely to support the humanity of the future.

Be cautious about the gradual creep of regulations and bureaucracy.812 Humans die, but the laws they created don’t.

The government tends to stand in the way of innovation, even with good intentions. Sometimes they overregulate industries to the point where innovation becomes difficult.

I believe it is my obligation to object to a regulation that does not serve the public good. That’s the only time I object.

We have to work to actively reduce the number of laws and regulations. Otherwise, as more laws and regulations are passed, eventually everything becomes illegal. You get into these Orwellian situations where going left is illegal and going right is illegal. There isn’t anything you can do that is legal.

Eventually, we’re like Gulliver, tied down by thousands of little strings. You can’t move. No single one of those strings is the issue. The problem is there are a million of them.825 We lose our freedom, one regulation at a time.

Generating sustainable energy is the biggest environmental issue that we face.

The future of energy will be primarily solar with wind. We absolutely need stationary storage batteries because of the intermittency of both solar and wind. There will also be hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear—these are all good. Battery cell production is the fundamental rate-limiter slowing down a sustainable-energy future. Very important problem.834 We want to move as quickly as we can to a solar electric economy. The faster we get there, the better it is for the world.835 We could probably have a civilization that is a hundred times as energy intensive as we currently have it.

We must be very careful in how we develop AI. It’s a great power, and with great power comes great responsibility. It would be wise for us to have (at least) an objective third party who can go in and understand what the various leading players are doing with AI. Even if there’s no enforcement ability, at least they can voice concerns publicly.

We’re on the cusp of an artificial intelligence revolution. For a very long time, we’ve been the smartest creatures on Earth. That’s been our defining characteristic. Now, what happens when there’s something way smarter than us?

The more separate we are—the more the AI is “other”—the more likely it is to turn on us. If the AIs are all separate and vastly more intelligent than us, how do we ensure they don’t have optimization functions contrary to the best interests of humanity? We may end up with the choice of either being useless and left behind, or being a pet—like a house cat—unless we figure out some way to be symbiotic and merge with AI. (A house cat would be a good outcome, by the way.)

We must build benign AI that loves humanity. It is extremely important to build AI with a rigorous adherence to truth, even if that truth is politically incorrect. My intuition is AI could be very dangerous if you force it to believe things that are not true.

Mark my words: If we do not program AI to be as truthful as possible, that is where it will go. That is where the danger lies.

The lesson there is: Don’t force an AI to lie or do things that are axiomatically incompatible, or mutually impossible. Don’t force AI to lie, even if the truth is unpleasant.850 Honesty is the best policy.851 We want to have a maximally truthful AI, even if what it says is not “politically correct.” We want it to focus on being as accurate as possible.852 I can’t emphasize this enough. A rigorous adherence to truth is the most important thing for AI safety. And, obviously, empathy for humanity and life as we know it.853 AI mirrors the mistakes of its creators.

A low birth rate is a slow death for a civilization.

If the birth rate is below the replacement rate and that trend continues, we will eventually disappear. It’s elementary. At a base level: no humans, no humanity.

Durant looked at one civilization after another, hundreds of them. They all went through the same cycle. When the civilization was under stress, the birth rate was high. But as soon as there were no external enemies or they had an extended period of prosperity, the birth rate inevitably dropped. Every time. I don’t believe there’s a single exception.

Population collapse is a real and immediate concern.

The biggest myth that exists right now is this “overpopulation” myth. In fact, we have a population collapse problem.

Having children is the most optimistic thing somebody could do. It means you care about and believe in the future.

The window of opportunity is open right now to make life multiplanetary. We cannot count on it being open for a long time. We need to take advantage while this window is open.

Deciding what is important through the lens of history is a good way to distinguish what seems important now from what is truly important over the long term.

Any species that does not become multiplanetary is simply waiting around until their extinction event, either self-inflicted or external.

Humans can cause our own extinction too; other creatures didn’t have that option.

Now there’s no geographic isolation. Our civilization is globalized, so civilization rises and falls together. This is a big risk. This should be the most important lesson of history: Things don’t always go up.

Making life multiplanetary is one of the most important things we could accomplish. This will help preserve the light of consciousness.

Think of us being a multiplanet species as taking out insurance for life itself. Life insurance, for life.

Reusable rockets are the modern-day equivalent of the first ships that could cross oceans. Until you have a breakthrough technology enabling travel, there’s no way for entrepreneurial energy to do anything.

Earth is the cradle of humanity. We cannot stay in the cradle forever. It is time to go forth, be out there among the stars. Expand the scope and scale of human consciousness.

When space travel becomes as common as air travel, the future of civilization will be assured.

You are the magicians of the twenty-first century; don’t let anything hold you back. Imagination is the limit. Go out there and create some magic.

The 69 Core Musk Methods These were selected as some of the fundamental ideas that make Elon and his companies successful. They have been edited or paraphrased into short, memorable maxims. You are capable of more than you think. It’s possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary. You can teach yourself anything. Read widely; talk to experts. Assume you’re wrong. Aspire to be less wrong. Internalize responsibility. If we don’t make stuff, there is no stuff. Creating products and services creates wealth. A useful life is worth having lived. Don’t aspire to glory; aspire to work. Take actions that increase the odds of the future being good. Every day, we either increase the rate of innovation or it slows down. Work on what is just becoming possible. Don’t wait for the world to want it. If it should obviously exist, go build it. Build what no one else is building. As you move forward, allies will assemble around you. Prototypes are proof. Start somewhere, question assumptions, and adapt to reality. Reason from fundamentals, not from what others are doing. “The magic-wand number.” See the theoretically perfect and work toward it. “Know the idiot index.” Understand the cost of components. The Algorithm: Question Requirements → Try to Delete the Part or Process → Simplify → Accelerate → Automate. For critical items, have meetings every twenty-four hours to run The Algorithm and check progress from yesterday. Stay as close to the actual work as possible. Do not separate yourself from the pain of your decisions. All requirements should be treated as recommendations. The only fixed laws are the laws of physics. The best part is no part; the best process is no process. Simplicity creates both reliability and low cost. Find the design necessity of every part and every process. Overdelete and add back the absolutely necessary. Push for radical breakthroughs. Be proactive. You will never win unless you take charge of setting the strategy. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. A factory moving at twice the speed of another factory is basically equivalent to two factories. Attack the bottleneck. If you have 9,999 things that are working and one that isn’t, that one sets the overall production rate. You’ll move as fast as your least-lucky or least-competent supplier. Do things in parallel. Give teams one key metric to focus on. Video games without a score are boring. Separating design, engineering, and manufacturing is a recipe for dysfunction. Speed of innovation is what matters. Beat competitors on speed, quality, and cost, not anticompetitive behavior. Test the absurd. When something seems impossible, ask: “What would it take?” Money is not the constraint. Exceptional engineers are. Get everyone thinking like the chief engineer. Get a clear, direct feedback loop with reality. Always be smashing your ego. Ensure ability > ego. Ask, “Is this effort resulting in a better product or service?” If not, stop. Good taste is learnable.…

Expose yourself to as many smart people as possible. Read a lot of books.