Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson was a long but very engaging read. I’ve never been an Elon Musk fan, therefore didn’t follow SpaceX or Tesla very closely. The book consists of lots of short chapters, each focusing on a different period of his life, including his companies, his childhood and family, and his marriages.

Isaacson doesn’t shy away from depicting Elon Musk’s flaws. It was also the case for his book on Steve Jobs. Reading how he treats his employees, I could see his effectiveness, but it’s definitely not for everyone.

The book contains interesting takeaways on running a business. Here are some of my notes:

Business

• Every part, every process, and every specification needs to have a name attached. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. No design by committee. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” Requirements should be treated as recommendations.
• Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.
• Comradery is dangerous. It makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work.
• It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong.
• Musk insisted on setting unrealistic deadlines even when they weren’t necessary. He set unrealistic deadlines, and when people balked, he would stare at them without blinking and say, “Don’t be afraid, you can do it.”
• Musk calculated that 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.”

Personality and Need for Drama

• Elon’s rough childhood and his brain wiring allowed him to shut down emotions. This emotional shutoff valve also made him a risk-seeking innovator. It led to an exceedingly high tolerance for risk.
• He could be a bully and brutal.
• The PTSD from his childhood also instilled in him an aversion to contentment.
• Musk was a drama addict. She came to the conclusion that Musk cultivated drama because he needed a lot of stimuli to keep him invigorated.
• “Extended periods of calm are unnerving for him”. Usually at such moments of unnerving success, Musk manufactures a drama. He launches a surge, scrambles the jets, announces an unrealistic and unnecessary deadline. “Normally, he would go into one of his companies and find something to turn into a crisis.”

Manufacturing

• His focus on cost, as well as his natural controlling instincts, led him to want to manufacture as many components as possible in-house, rather than buy them from suppliers, which was then the standard practice in the rocket and car industries. After a few years, SpaceX was making in-house 70 percent of the components of its rockets.
• One of the most important decisions that Elon Musk made about Tesla—the defining imprint that led to its success and its impact on the auto industry—was that it should make its own key components, rather than piecing together a car with hundreds of components from independent suppliers.
• Over the years, Musk was able to use techniques learned at SpaceX and apply them to Tesla, and vice versa.
• He believed that designing the factory to build a car—the machine that builds the machine—was as important as designing the car itself.

Engineers and Designers

• Musk put the engineers and designers in the same room.
• He had always believed that Tesla’s design engineers needed to be located right next to the assembly line, rather than allowing manufacturing to be done at a remote location.
• Product managers who don’t know anything about coding keep ordering up features they don’t know how to create, like cavalry generals who don’t know how to ride a horse.

Hardcore

• For his entire life, he had been hardcore and all in. It was a badge of honor to him.
• Life cannot be merely about solving problems, he felt. It also had to be about pursuing great dreams.
• (Tesla) “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.”
• When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard.
• (Twitter) He wanted deep cuts not only for financial reasons but also because he wanted a hardcore, fanatic work culture. “We want people who declare they are hardcore.”
• (Space X) “We are shooting for Mars. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle.”
• (Tesla) “Faster. Faster! Please mark anytime a date has slipped. All bad news should be given loudly and often. Good news can be said quietly and once.”
• “Why can’t that be done faster?” is one of his favorites.
• He had slept on the floor of his first office at Zip2 in 1995. He had slept on the roof of Tesla’s Nevada battery factory in 2017. He did it because it was in his nature to love the drama, the urgency, and the sense that he was a wartime general who could rally his troops into battle mode.
• I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

First Principles

• The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.
• There is no first-principles reason this can’t work
• It was a case of first principles: humans drove using only visual data; therefore machines should be able to.

Leadership

• Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do.
• Managers of software teams must spend at least 20% 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.
• If you ask Musk what are the traits needed in a CEO, he would not include “being a really nice guy.” One of his maxims is that managers should not aim to be liked. “What Twitter needs is a fire-breathing dragon,” he said after that meeting, “and Parag is not that.”
• “It’s true that if they see the general out on the battlefield, the troops are going to be motivated.”
• Musk had shown little interest in philanthropy over the years. He felt that the good he could do for humanity was best accomplished by keeping his money deployed in his companies.

Twitter

• He threatened to shut down the business, even declare bankruptcy, if they didn’t turn things around. Success would require a complete change in the company’s mellow, easygoing, and nurturing culture. “The road ahead is arduous and will require intense work.”
• What did you get done this week?
• You have ninety days to do it. If you can’t make that work, your resignation is accepted.
• Discomfort, he believed, was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency. Vacations, flower-smelling, work-life balance, and days of “mental rest” were not his thing. Let that sink in.
• If you can show up in an office and you do not show up at the office: resignation accepted. End of story.

Overall, I enjoyed this book a lot and look forward to reading other biographies by Walter Isaacson.