After 7 years of research and 6 months making this documentary, I'm handing you what I believe are s

Transcript

0:02

On May 25, 2012,

0:05

SpaceX was about to do what many said was impossible.

0:10

A Falcon 9 had carried the Dragon capsule toward the International Space Station.

0:15

If it succeeded,

0:16

it would mark a historic moment.

0:19

The first time a private company would deliver cargo to the ISS.

0:24

But then,

0:27

a critical navigation sensor failed.

0:29

One miscalculation and Dragon could collide with a four-hundred-ton

0:35

structure carrying six human beings.

0:38

NASA expected an abort.

0:40

SpaceX’s answer?

0:43

Push a software update in orbit.

0:48

What? You're going to rewrite the software right next to our space station?

0:52

This moment wasn't anecdotal.

0:54

It was the output of an operating system.

0:57

system.

0:58

I spent seven years reverse-engineering that system.

1:02

While writing The Musk Way, I spoke with the first NASA official to ever visit

1:07

SpaceX,

1:08

PayPal's seventh employee,

1:11

SpaceX's former launch director, engineers and executives across Tesla,

1:17

Neuralink and multiple industries.

1:20

By analyzing his approach across companies,

1:23

I have distilled his successes into a practical operating system for building

1:28

companies that other people think are impossible and that any entrepreneur can study

1:34

and adapt.

1:36

That system is what this video is about.

1:48

Steve was a higher bunch of rocket guys and Elon would go read rocket manuals.

1:52

Jim Keller, who worked alongside both Steve Jobs and Musk,

1:56

wasn't joking.

1:58

Following Musk's $180 million cash out when eBay bought PayPal in 2002.

2:03

Musk and his PayPal pals celebrated in Las Vegas.

2:08

Kevin Hartz, an early PayPal investor, couldn't believe what he saw that night.

2:13

We're all hanging out in this cabana at the Hard Rock Cafe and Elon is there reading

2:18

some obscure Soviet rocket manual that was all moldy and looked like it had been

2:23

bought on eBay.

2:25

But there was a limit to what books alone could teach.

2:28

Kevin Brogan was SpaceX employee number 23.

2:32

During his decade working alongside Musk, he had a front-row seat to that learning

2:37

process. He would quiz you until he learned 90% of what you know.

2:42

But this method had some unusual characteristic.

2:45

Most powerful people, when they don't know something, show confidence.

2:50

Musk does the opposite. People don't like to ask dumb questions and look dumb,

2:54

right? But Elon, when he doesn't know something he asks.

2:59

While Musk was comfortable asking dumb questions, there was one type of stupidity he

3:05

wouldn't tolerate.

3:07

In 2004, a SpaceX engineer named Steve Davis needed a part,

3:12

an actuator to steer the upper stage of the Falcon 1 rocket.

3:16

He'd never built a piece of hardware in his life, so he asked suppliers for a quote.

3:22

The number came back $120,000.

3:26

He brought it to Musk.

3:28

Elon laughed. He said, that part is no more complicated than a garage door opener.

3:34

Your budget is $5,000.

3:37

Go make it work.

3:39

Davis spent the next nine months building it himself.

3:44

The final cost?

3:45

$3,900.

3:48

It flew to space on Falcon 1.

3:51

A thirty-fold cost reduction.

3:53

How? now,

3:55

by abandoning every assumption about what the problem required and rebuilding it

4:00

from the physics up.

4:02

Musk formalized this thinking into a single metric he applies relentlessly across

4:07

every company he builds.

4:10

He calls it the Idiot Index.

4:12

Take the cost of a finished product divided by the cost of its raw materials.

4:18

The higher the index, the dumber the

4:21

idiot.

4:33

By

4:37

2017,

4:39

even the Idiot Index wasn't enough.

4:42

The Model 3, Tesla's first mass-market car, was stuck in production hell.

4:48

Well, the assembly line kept stalling.

4:50

Parts didn't fit. Processes that worked in theory collapsed in practice.

4:56

Musk was sleeping on the factory floor.

4:59

And somewhere in the middle of that chaos, he realized something.

5:04

Most companies make the same mistake he was making.

5:07

They try to move faster before they understand what they're doing.

5:11

They automate a system that shouldn't exist in the first place.

5:15

So Musk codified a sequence. He called it the algorithm.

5:21

The first thing he learned to distrust was the requirement itself.

5:27

The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not

5:31

exist.

5:32

Every requirement must have a name attached to it, because if nobody owns it,

5:37

nobody can challenge it. And if nobody can challenge it,

5:41

it survives forever.

5:44

For example, Musk had to ask his battery safety team why they had fiberglass masks

5:49

between the battery pack and the car floor.

5:51

They explained it was for minimizing noise and vibration.

5:55

When he asked the noise vibration analysis team, they cited fire safety as the

5:59

culprit.

6:00

This circular logic prompted Musk to test cars with and without the mats.

6:06

Finding no difference, he removed the mats, saving two million dollars.

6:11

Only after you've questioned the requirement do you move to the next step.

6:17

Deletion. The best part is no part.

6:20

The best process is no process.

6:22

Most organizations reward addition.

6:25

More features, more code, more meetings, more layers of approval.

6:30

Musk does the opposite. They would generally give like two points for deleting a

6:33

line of code, one point for adding a line of code.

6:35

The results are visible in the products themselves.

6:38

Benchmarking firm Caresoft Global analyzed Tesla vehicles against competitors and

6:45

found that in some systems Tesla cars use half the number of fasteners.

6:50

After deletion comes simplification.

6:53

Tesla applied this simplicity principle in their giga castings,

6:57

significantly improving manufacturing ability.

7:00

Beyond replacing dozens of welded riveted and glued parts with a single component,

7:06

the new design transformed the assembly process.

7:09

The U-shape lets the operator come inside the vehicles actually and assembly

7:16

the vehicle from the interior to the exterior.

7:19

Now you are ready to accelerate, not in the naive sense of moving faster.

7:25

Accelerate goes more down the line of pushing the existing limits and finding where

7:30

the system breaks so that you can improve it.

7:33

During Tesla's production hell of 2018, Musk realized one robot was moving too

7:38

slowly. His team discovered the cause.

7:41

The robot was set to 20% of its maximum speed because those were its default

7:45

settings.

7:47

Factory settings are always idiotic, Musk said.

7:50

Tesla technicians rewrote the code to speed up the machine,

7:54

cutting the operation time by more than half.

7:57

And only then, when the system has survived every previous test,

8:02

do you automate. The sequence matters.

8:05

Automate too early, and you don't eliminate mistakes.

8:09

You scale them.

8:11

During a chance encounter, HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah asked Elon Musk about

8:16

the secret of his success.

8:18

The answer was so powerful that years later, Shah would still be teaching the idea

8:24

to thousands of entrepreneurs.

8:35

Every person on the team is a vector,

8:39

and your progress as a company is determined by the sum of all vectors.

8:45

That's all he said.

8:47

Imagine trying to pull an 80,000-pound

8:50

truck with four people.

8:52

You pick the strongest individuals you can find.

8:55

But on the day of the competition,

8:58

two pull from one side and two from the other.

9:01

the truck doesn't move. Strength is not enough.

9:05

Direction is everything.

9:08

The question is, how do you build a team that pulls together?

9:13

It begins before day one.

9:16

Zach Kirkhorn became Tesla's CFO.

9:18

He had the right degrees, the right background.

9:21

But that's not what Musk was looking for.

9:24

We'll look for evidence of exceptional ability if someone won a national science

9:30

fair or created some amazing bit of electronics or software as a teenager.

9:35

What stood out about Kirkhorn was that he had led his university's solar racing team

9:40

and in his spare time converted a remote-controlled car into an amphibious

9:46

vehicle and

9:49

for some people Musk recruits the line between their work and their identity

9:53

disappears entirely.

9:56

Meet Dr. Matthew MacDougall, Neuralink's lead neurosurgeon.

10:01

What do you think this lump between his thumb and index finger is?

10:05

A small writable RFID tag. It's a very small implantable

10:11

chip.

10:12

MacDougall used this implant as a key for his house to access Neuralink's office

10:17

doors and even as a crypto safe.

10:21

This is exactly the personality Musk selects for and he does not wait for these

10:27

people to find him.

10:29

At 6 a.m., the phone rang at Sanjay Bhargava's home.

10:33

His wife, groggy from sleep, picked up.

10:36

On the other end was an unfamiliar voice.

10:39

There's a strange call that someone called Elon Musk who's saying he's from X.com,

10:45

and he wants to speak to you.

10:46

So he looks like, and she actually said that she said it seems like someone from

10:51

Mars. Bhargava suggested he might meet Musk next time he was in California.

10:56

Musk's response was immediate.

10:58

You don't understand.

11:00

My office is sending you a ticket to just get on to the next flight.

11:05

But alignment has a flip side.

11:08

When SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 rockets failed to reach orbit,

11:12

Musk didn't fire the engineers.

11:14

years. What he fires people for is different.

11:18

When he acquired Twitter in 2022, he established three criteria for who would

11:23

remain, excellence,

11:25

trustworthiness, and drive.

11:28

To evaluate technical excellence, he brought in engineers from his other companies

11:33

to review code quality and output.

11:36

To examine trust,

11:38

his team reviewed Twitter's public Slack channels and social media,

11:42

searching for employees who had expressed deep hostility toward him or the company's

11:48

direction. For intensity,

11:50

one engineer five months before the acquisition had described working.

11:54

About four hours a week, the last quarter.

11:57

Musk sent a company-wide email, commit to a hardcore work ethic or leave.

12:03

In three weeks, 80% of Twitter's staff were gone.

12:07

The distinction he draws is precise.

12:10

Failure is a problem of capability, which can be coached.

12:15

Misalignment is a problem of values or commitment, which cannot.

12:20

The first gets patience, the second gets a swift exit.

12:25

Because vectors only work when everyone pulls in the same direction.

12:30

And there should always be a leading arrow.

12:33

In SpaceX's early days, the Merlin engine kept cracking under heat,

12:38

halting progress. Tom Mueller,

12:41

the veteran engineer behind his design, doubted Musk's suggestion to patch it with

12:46

epoxy.

12:47

Musk insisted they try.

12:50

One December night in 2003, dressed for a Christmas party,

12:54

Musk came to the factory and poured the epoxy into the engine himself.

12:59

He ruined his $2,000 shoes and missed the party, but won something far more valuable

13:06

the respect of his team. He

13:09

didn't just propose solutions.

13:11

He tested them with his own hands.

13:14

That moment captured a principle Musk would demand across all his companies.

13:20

Managers and software must write great software, or it's like being a cavalry

13:25

captain who can't ride a horse.

13:28

With leading from the front, still wasn't enough.

13:31

It had to be visible.

13:34

The deafening sound of metal against metal echoed through Tesla's Fremont factory as

13:39

Marc Andreessen crossed the floor.

13:42

The Netscape co-founder visited Elon Musk during one of Tesla's most challenging

13:46

periods. When he'd first heard that Musk was sleeping in the factory,

13:50

he expected to find the CEO in a quiet office somewhere.

13:54

Instead, he found Musk on the factory floor.

13:57

The giant fucking robots are like 15 feet away.

14:02

They're pounding metal and it's like ear splitting.

14:05

Why would any CEO stand there?

14:08

During shift change, the entire team could see me.

14:12

The vector was impossible to miss.

14:15

Everyone knew which direction to pull.

14:18

The signal wasn't limited to where Musk stood.

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It extended to what he was willing to risk.

14:24

I've never heard of another company tying.

14:26

Nobody's ever done it. That Tuesday morning, January 23rd,

14:30

2018,

14:31

the global financial press woke up in shock.

14:35

Tesla's board had approved a compensation package for Elon Musk,

14:39

unlike anything in corporate history.

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He would receive no salary, no guaranteed bonus, nothing,

14:47

unless Tesla achieved a series of escalating targets over the following decade.

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If the targets were missed, he earned nothing.

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If they were hit, he would receive the largest payout in corporate history.

15:00

It was a statement about skin in the game.

15:03

After selling Zip2, his first company, Musk had put $12.5 million,

15:09

most of what he made, directly into PayPal.

15:13

His investor, Michael Moritz, warned him, Dude, you should not have basically

15:19

everything except your house and car in a company.

15:22

Musk's response?

15:23

He increased his stake even more.

15:26

Most founders asked employees and investors to believe in the company.

15:31

Musk was betting almost everything he had on it.

15:34

But even with the right team and the right capital, Musk still had to solve a deeper

15:40

problem. How do you keep the speed, innovation, and raw drive of a startup

15:46

as you scale to thousands of employees?

15:50

Most companies think the answer is process.

15:53

Few people could compare the two cultures better than Lars Moravy,

15:57

Tesla's VP of Vehicle Engineering, who came from Honda.

16:02

Honda, great process, doesn't matter how good of an engineer,

16:06

good car. Tesla,

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no process, great engineers, great car.

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Traditional companies build processes to manage the risk of human error.

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Musk's companies build cultures that treat the process itself as the risk.

16:22

The question is never, are you following the procedure?

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It is, does the procedure make sense?

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You should definitely fight the system.

16:32

Don't follow instructions if they don't seem right.

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It doesn't matter if you got those instructions from the vice president or from

16:38

freaking me.

16:40

That freedom had a consequence you could measure in time.

16:44

Good friend of mine designs automated assembly equipment.

16:47

They had a contract with Tesla.

16:50

John McElroy is one of the most respected journalists in Detroit.

16:54

In a meeting about the electric motor assembly line, his friend proposed a smarter

16:59

way to automate production. We have to put in these fixtures that locate the motor

17:05

very precisely…Unless…

17:07

in the casting of the motor, if you can put this little lip on it,

17:12

we can grab that very early in the process.

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And we'll just hold on to it there.

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And as it goes down the line, we can get rid of all these other fixtures.

17:20

As he explained the idea, the Tesla engineer he was talking with started typing on

17:26

his laptop.

17:27

McElroy's friend soon realized what he was doing.

17:30

Before the meeting was over, the design change was approved.

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McElroy asked him, if you were at one of the legacy automakers,

17:39

how long would that take? He goes, oh, two years.

17:43

At Legacy Automakers, a design change triggers a chain of approvals.

17:48

At Tesla, the people closest to the problem are expected,

17:52

not permitted, expected to solve it immediately.

17:57

But how is that even possible?

17:59

Imagine that you are the CEO of a space company that builds and launches rockets.

18:05

How many non-engineers would you need?

18:07

Logic would dictate a strong legal department, a finance team,

18:12

an HR department, a communications team.

18:16

That is not Musk's Logic.

18:19

We have one person in our finance group.

18:22

We have one lawyer. Engineering is signal and management is noise.

18:26

But

18:28

keeping a workforce full of builders is only half the battle.

18:32

The other half is how information flows between them.

18:36

Most companies have an unwritten rule.

18:39

To communicate across departments, you go up the chain, across,

18:43

and back down.

18:45

Musk calls that super dumb, so he made a written rule instead.

18:50

Anyone can talk to anyone. No approval layers, just the fastest path to solving the

18:57

problem.

18:59

But communication isn't just about who can talk to whom.

19:03

It's also about how many people are talking.

19:07

Former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy

19:09

revealed the philosophy in a single sentence.

19:12

I would have to like, basically, plead to hire people.

19:17

But why does Musk prefer small teams?

19:19

Because of a mathematical reality from the 1970s, adding people to a late project

19:25

often makes it later.

19:28

Two people have just one communication channel.

19:31

Add three more and that number jumps to ten.

19:34

A 12-person team, 66 channels.

19:38

Communication overhead grows quadratically.

19:42

Small teams move faster but only if the right workers are sitting together.

19:47

Traditional carmakers work in silos, powertrain, thermal systems,

19:52

software, leading to clunky integration.

19:55

Musk flips this with small, multidisciplinary teams.

20:00

There's no powertrain team or packaging team.

20:04

Instead, you have mission teams.

20:06

Like what is this module? And it includes people of all skill disciplines working on

20:11

that full-time within touching distance of each other.

20:14

The product that came out of those rooms reflected it.

20:19

When manufacturing expert Sandy Munro cracked open a Tesla Model 3,

20:24

he stopped at this single cable.

20:27

That one cable does everything, and unfortunately for the Chevy Bolt,

20:31

those are the cables you need to have in order to do what this is doing.

20:36

Musk had a clear culprit.

20:38

The product errors reflect the organizational errors.

20:42

Fix the organization. The product will follow.

20:47

If communication is the lifeblood of a company, then anything that slows it down

20:52

becomes a target.

20:54

Please get out of all large meetings.

20:58

But Musk is not against meetings.

21:00

He's against low-signal meetings.

21:03

The kind where problems get buried before they even reach the top.

21:08

I'm a big believer in skip-level meetings.

21:09

Instead of hearing updates only from managers, he talks directly to the employees

21:16

several layers below them, where problems are usually discovered first.

21:21

And there are two rules.

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First, there can't be advanced preparation.

21:28

No scripts. No filtering. Second,

21:32

if you're in a meeting with me, try to bring up at least one bit of bad news.

21:37

Bad news should be loud. repeated and immediate.

21:42

Good news can be said quietly once.

21:46

But even the best team is useless if it's trapped behind a wall of accounting.

21:50

I could pick up on the other end of the phone that some people were laughing.

21:55

That was Brian Mosdell, who joined SpaceX in 2008, fresh from two decades at Cape

22:01

Canaveral.

22:02

His first call with SpaceX leadership shattered everything he thought he knew about

22:07

how organizations should work.

22:10

Mosdell described a detailed plan complete with budget breakdowns and approval

22:15

processes. After the laughter, they told him, we don't have budgets here.

22:20

There's no such thing.

22:22

You know, Elon has in his head an

22:26

idea of what it should cost to build a launch pad.

22:30

Your job is to go build it for as cheaply as you can

22:36

and still make a quality launch pad.

22:42

Traditional companies force employees to justify every expense and plan everything

22:47

in advance, slowing execution.

22:50

At Musk's companies, friction vanishes.

22:53

Teams, not projects, get funded.

22:56

And individuals are empowered to act immediately.

22:59

From the minute you're hired, you're empowered.

23:01

You can buy a robot. You can buy land.

23:03

You could buy a truck. However, this drive could face its limits,

23:08

and many Musk employees burned out, left the company, or took short sabbaticals and

23:13

returned later.

23:15

We were fighting for our lives, and without that commitment,

23:19

the company would fold. Ryan Mosdell said of SpaceX in 2008,

23:23

Six years later, the company had enough cash flow to survive and the continued

23:29

intensity began to feel less justified.

23:32

At that moment, Mosdell concluded that the real Elon's hidden first principle was,

23:38

work your team until they drop and replace them when they do.

23:42

That year, he left the company.

23:46

Yet for others, the rewards outweighed the sacrifices.

23:49

I frequently did work 12 plus hour days and pulled many all-nighters at the office,

23:55

but again, this wasn't because I was forced to, but because I loved my work and saw

24:01

the value I was bringing to the team.

24:08

Almost everything you heard came from research for The Musk Way.

24:12

I tracked down and interviewed former employees from SpaceX,

24:16

Tesla, Neuralink, and PayPal, Alongside leading experts across the automotive and

24:22

aerospace industries, I took over 9,200 notes, read 40 books,

24:29

analyzed 2,000 articles, and watched 800 videos, all to extract the

24:35

raw systematic principles must applies across every square inch of his empire.

24:42

If you want the complete unfiltered playbook, it's waiting for you inside the book.

24:46

The link is right below.

24:52

In the early 1990s, NASA chased a mantra, faster, better,

24:57

cheaper.

24:59

After a string of failures, they concluded it was impossible.

25:03

You could pick two, never all three.

25:06

Musk begged to differ.

25:15

After

25:25

the launch, Musk couldn't sit still.

25:27

While his team watched the screens inside, he walked out,

25:32

staring up into the dark, waiting for the booster to come home.

25:36

Then,

25:41

Musk

25:53

assumed the booster had exploded.

25:57

He waited for the fireball that should have followed.

26:00

It never came.

26:22

The booster was on the pad. upright, intact.

26:32

It wasn't an explosion.

26:35

It was a sonic boom.

26:37

The Falcon 9 booster breaking the sound barrier on its way home.

26:43

For sixty years, rockets had been one-and-done.

26:46

Launch, crash, sink. It's really crazy that we build these sophisticated rockets and

26:52

then crash them every time we fly.

26:55

The industry hadn't believed he could change it.

26:59

When they come out and say it's going to be ten times cheaper,

27:02

I want to find out what they are smoking."

27:06

A decade later, SpaceX was reusing those boosters, slashing costs,

27:11

multiplying launches, getting more reliable with every flight.

27:16

By 2025,

27:17

SpaceX carried over 80% of all mass humanity put into orbit.

27:22

China, about 10%. The rest of the world combined?

27:27

find? Noise.

27:29

NASA said faster, better, cheaper,

27:33

couldn't be done. You could only pick two.

27:36

Musk delivered all three.

27:39

How?

27:40

It starts with one rule. Stop throwing money away.

27:45

We were given sticks and stones and we were asked to build a spaceship.

27:49

Here's four pieces of wood and here's two pieces of rock.

27:52

Can you get 10,000 parts out the door tomorrow?

27:54

world. Former Tesla employee Farzad Mesbahi meant that as an analogy.

28:00

At SpaceX,

28:01

it had already happened, literally.

28:04

In 2005, if SpaceX had been a traditional aerospace company,

28:09

they would have used a transporter, a specialized multimillion-dollar

28:14

vehicle designed to move rockets from the hangar to the launchpad.

28:18

Instead, with no such equipment,

28:21

the team relied on a technique that wouldn't have looked out of place in the Bronze

28:25

Age.

28:26

They laid down plywood sheets on the ground,

28:29

rolling the rocket's cradle forward in small increments before repositioning the

28:34

plywood ahead of it. It was slow,

28:37

it was crude,

28:38

but it worked.

28:41

This scrappiness became so notorious that Air Force officials nicknamed two SpaceX

28:46

employees Sanford and Son after the 1970s sitcom about a pair of junk dealers.

28:53

Being scrappy solved immediate problems, but to disrupt entire industries,

28:58

Musk needed a strategy.

29:00

In 2011, Nissan's then-star CEO Carlos Ghosn advocated starting

29:06

with a mass-market EV.

29:09

Through economies of scale, prices would fall.

29:14

Musk disagreed. Economies of scale were just one of the two ingredients to make

29:19

products affordable. The Second, being able to optimize the design.

29:25

By starting with a high-price, low-volume

29:27

sports car, the Roadster, Tesla could perfect its technology while generating

29:32

revenue to fund the next stage, a more affordable Model S,

29:37

and eventually the mass-market Model 3.

29:41

Learn, iterate, scale.

29:44

With the product polished, there was another way to slash costs.

29:48

Hey dad, there's another supercharger,

29:52

Jim Farley, Ford CEO,

29:55

heard this on a family road trip and realized Tesla's network was simply better,

30:00

easier to find, faster, and more reliable.

30:04

In May 2023,

30:06

Ford announced it would adopt Tesla's North American charging standard.

30:11

Soon, nearly every US automaker joined.

30:15

This traced back to a decision that looked, at the time,

30:19

like naivety. Tesla opening its patents and inviting rivals to use its

30:24

superchargers.

30:26

It was not naivety.

30:28

It was a strategy.

30:30

Sharing lowered Tesla's cost by spreading infrastructure across the industry.

30:36

The same logic powered the Cybertruck's 48-volt system.

30:40

By publishing the playbook for the new architecture, Tesla encouraged industry-wide

30:45

adoption.

30:47

It's self-serving…

30:48

Because right now, he's paying his volume for all these unique 48.

30:52

Well, if you all come in here, all these modules, all these motors,

30:55

the price would come down.

30:57

For Musk's companies, the payoff was enormous.

31:00

But…was

31:02

money the most important variable?

31:05

Elon has said to the team many times,

31:07

it's okay to scrap equipment or money.

31:10

It's not okay to scrap time. In

31:23

2014, states were competing to host Tesla's first gigafactory.

31:28

San Antonio offered the richest tax incentives.

31:31

Musk turned them down.

31:34

This is the first time I heard that incentives were not the most important thing.

31:39

What Musk wanted wasn't money.

31:42

It was speed.

31:43

Nevada promised permits at record pace, inspections at two in the morning.

31:48

Musk was so committed to velocity that he pursued multiple sites simultaneously even

31:54

paying millions extra just to avoid any last-minute delays.

31:59

To understand

32:04

how, we must trace a phrase that started as an internal SpaceX joke.

32:11

In 2018, the Boring company posted this video titled green lights to Malibu.

32:17

To outsiders, something didn't add up.

32:21

The video title wasn't a project announcement.

32:24

It was an inside joke borrowed from another Musk company,

32:28

SpaceX.

32:29

Engineers working eighty-hour weeks in Hawthorne joked that if they hit every light

32:35

green and drove fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit,

32:39

they could reach Malibu in thirty minutes.

32:42

But in reality, with traffic Making red lights, the trip would take more than an

32:46

hour.

32:48

The phrase became code for Musk's aggressive borderline-impossible deadlines.

32:53

With time, this joke became an engineering tool.

32:57

Inside Musk's companies, it is known as

33:00

all green light schedule that forces workers to ask a radical question.

33:05

If every single light is green, you know there's no administrative burdens or delays

33:10

or no shipping delays or risk, or, you know, no legacy bottlenecks,

33:16

how fast can you build it?

33:18

Tesla's former CIO, Jay Vijayan, discovered what that meant in practice when he

33:24

presented Musk with an eighteen-month timeline to build the company's custom

33:29

enterprise software from scratch.

33:32

Musk's response? I want this to be delivered in four weeks.

33:36

Vijayan delivered.

33:38

On paper, there was another outside entity that couldn't be accelerated.

33:42

Germany is not famous for regulatory speed.

33:46

Berlin-Brandenburg Airport took nearly thirty years to complete.

33:51

And just twenty miles away,

33:53

Tesla set out to build its first European factory.

33:57

Tesla's approach was different in two ways.

33:59

First, they found a site which BMW had already scouted.

34:05

A ton of the environmental work and all of the permits and stuff had already been

34:10

Then,

34:12

when no shortcut existed, Tesla's team read the permitting regulations themselves

34:17

line by line. Honestly, this is about pain threshold.

34:22

Second, they began construction before the final permits were approved.

34:27

If it didn't come through, they'd be forced to demolish the entire factory.

34:33

We took a big risk, a really big financial risk.

34:37

But all the speed we've seen at Musk's companies shouldn't be mistaken for

34:43

sloppiness.

34:44

My desire to be a perfectionist with respect to the product is greater than my

34:49

impatience.

34:50

They will not ship a bad product.

34:57

That sounds like a contradiction.

34:59

How can a company that moves this fast and fails this often also refuse to ship

35:05

anything flawed?

35:07

The answer is in how Musk's companies use failure.

35:11

On

35:16

April 20th, 2023, SpaceX launched Starship for the first time,

35:21

the largest, most powerful rocket ever built.

35:25

Four minutes into the flight, it tumbled out of control and exploded.

35:29

Several engines failed, the stage is never separated, and the launch pad below had

35:35

been torn apart.

35:37

To the outside world, it looked like a catastrophe.

35:41

Inside SpaceX? You

35:47

would still describe this as a success?

35:51

Yeah, absolutely.

35:53

To understand why, you have to see the two ways a rocket gets built.

35:58

Traditional aerospace runs a linear model.

36:01

Design everything, test everything, integrate everything,

36:05

and only then launch.

36:08

It looks safe because they've tried to eliminate every failure mode on paper first.

36:14

but it's slow and expensive because every flaw stays hidden until the

36:20

end when it's costliest to fix.

36:24

SpaceX inverts it. All of the initial production is simply a learning exercise…It’s

36:30

really just a question of what knowledge can you learn in the shortest period of

36:33

time.

36:33

SpaceX designs rockets with an iterative model to fail fast and informatively.

36:39

Each explosion is a dataset. that four-minute flight in April 2023 produced more

36:46

real-world engineering data than years of ground testing ever could.

36:51

The failures aren't sloppiness.

36:53

They're the opposite.

36:55

Every product that ships has already been hammered against reality.

36:59

To Musk, failure isn't the opposite of a perfect product.

37:03

It's the fastest route there.

37:08

Though Musk's companies iterate Relentlessly, one traditional consumer step is

37:14

off-limits —

37:15

Mentioning it around him can earn a reprimand.

37:19

Never.

37:23

It is almost forbidden.

37:25

It is a word not said in Elon's presence.

37:33

Musk's companies build for the product that should exist.

37:37

But once it does, they'd harvest feedback at an intensity most companies would find

37:43

impossible to process.

37:45

Every Tesla on the road is a sensor.

37:48

A simple voice command, bug report, triggers a snapshot of system diagnostics.

37:54

When engineers noticed that customers rarely used at the sunroof,

37:58

they didn't commission a study.

38:00

They checked the data and removed it.

38:03

The sequence matters. builders, build without asking, then listen.

38:08

And once the product is in customers' hands, Tesla handles change differently.

38:13

Traditional carmakers treat change like surgery, slow, expensive,

38:19

and only when necessary.

38:21

Updates arrive once a year with the next model.

38:24

Tesla does the opposite.

38:26

Our approach at Tesla was to adopt improvements as soon as they were ready.

38:30

That meant as many as 50 changes per week.

38:34

In 2018, Tesla removed welds from the Model 3's underbody after production had

38:40

already started.

38:42

A move that left industry veterans stunned.

38:45

Normally, you'd make changes like that in the prototype stage.

38:50

But even the best products won't change the world if nobody knows about them.

38:55

So how does Musk sell them? In

38:59

2013, tech writer Dan Lyons hailed Elon Musk as the best marketer in Silicon

39:05

Valley. The next day, Musk replied,

39:10

There was some recent article about how I'm such a great marketer.

39:13

I'm like, I say the stupidest things, that can't possibly be true.

39:19

You

39:30

know, I'm actually not the hugest believer in brand, or in marketing for that

39:35

matter. So

39:37

I think the real way that brand happens is if you make good products.

39:44

Later in that same meeting, a shareholder introduced himself as a current and future

39:48

Tesla owner. Musk turned to the room.

39:52

See, our brand right there.

39:56

His philosophy is clear. You spend less time on marketing presentations and more

40:00

time on your product.

40:02

Now,

40:04

does the system this extreme work?

40:07

This is the first time we've interviewed someone barefoot.

40:12

While I was writing the book, The Musk Way, a crew from Spain's biggest

40:16

investigative journalism program showed up at my door to interview me.

40:21

It was the equivalent of 60 minutes knocking on your house.

40:25

For every single TV appearance before that day, I had dressed up.

40:30

Why would I willingly compromise an opportunity like that?

40:34

That exact same night, I had an interview scheduled with Brian Mosdell,

40:40

the former SpaceX chief engineer and director of floor to launch operations.

40:45

Every single second I spent fixing my hair or tidying my appearance was a second

40:50

stolen from preparing for that call.

40:52

So I chose the product over the wrapping and

40:57

the product spoke for itself.

41:13

Once the product is outstanding, the strategy is simple,

41:17

get it into people's hands. I called it parking like a pimp.

41:23

I pulled the car up on the sidewalk, popped the frunk, and sit in it like a hammock

41:27

with my iPad.

41:29

David Havasi, a former Tesla sales employee, didn't need ads.

41:34

Crowds gathered around the Model S.

41:36

The central touchscreen’s glow attracted people who had never thought about electric

41:40

cars.

41:41

The car did the selling and it didn't just sell cars.

41:45

investors. It sold talent.

41:47

Gilbert Passin, a veteran automotive executive, experienced it firsthand after

41:52

driving the original Roadster.

41:56

Soon after, he joined Tesla.

42:00

It sold money, too.

42:02

During Tesla's IPO Roadshow, the company parked a Model S inside Morgan Stanley's

42:07

Manhattan headquarters.

42:09

I'd never seen investors with ear-to-ear grins on their faces before.

42:14

It even won over the giants.

42:16

Tesla retrofitted a smart car with battery technology in six weeks.

42:21

Daimler's head of advanced engineering drove it, stepped out smiling and said,

42:26

let's explore a partnership.

42:28

That test drive turned into a $70 million deal.

42:33

But the most unlikely convert sat at the very top of the industry Tesla was trying

42:38

to disrupt. When Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda, met Elon Musk and drove the Tesla

42:44

Roadster, he didn't just invest 50 million into Tesla.

42:49

He also sold Tesla the NUMMI factory, a facility once valued at roughly a billion

42:55

dollars for just 42 million dollars.

42:59

Why would the head of the world's largest automaker make a bet like that on a tiny

43:03

startup?

43:05

Musk-chan. I love him. By this point, the product wasn't the only thing doing the

43:11

selling.

43:12

Musk himself had become one, and he'd built that on purpose.

43:16

When Elon Musk's mother questioned his hunger for fame, his answer was,

43:21

nobody will sell me any parts if they don't know who I am.

43:25

He'd understood something early.

43:27

In a world drowning in information and starved for attention,

43:30

a personal brand wasn't vanity, it was infrastructure.

43:36

So, he built the most recognizable name in business.

43:40

By the 2020s, Musk was the most-followed person on X and he'd turned up in The

43:46

Simpsons, Iron Man 2, Rick and Morty, even Jeopardy.

43:51

He can go in front of the UK Parliament tomorrow and get to meet with any Prime

43:56

Minister or King. But fame isn't the same as influence.

44:01

What made people actually listen came down to three traits.

44:06

The first was authenticity, whereas traditional businesses claim.

44:11

We are communication strategy is in the direction of risk avoidance.

44:17

Musk does the opposite.

44:20

He disclosed his Asperger's on Saturday Night Live.

44:23

He smoked weed on Joe Rogan, whether you find that admirable or alarming.

44:28

It reads as real.

44:30

The second was wit.

44:32

In 2018, with Tesla close to bankruptcy,

44:35

Musk joked on Twitter about Teslaquilla bottles.

44:39

Two years later,

44:41

Tesla Tequila sold out in hours.

44:44

And the third was knowledge.

44:47

His ability to inspire and motivate the people who work for him derives completely

44:52

and only from his knowledge.

44:55

Together, those three traits made him impossible to ignore.

45:00

So in 2015, when only 2% of New York's luxury car buyers were even considering a

45:07

Model S,

45:08

Tesla didn't reach for an ad budget.

45:10

They sent their two strongest assets instead,

45:14

the product and the man.

45:17

Let's get Elon out to New York, let's get the cars out to New York.

45:20

But the product and the man were only two of Musk's tools.

45:25

He had more.

45:26

In a world full of noise, every launch had to be unforgettable.

45:31

So he engineered the buzz himself.

45:34

On February 6, 2018, SpaceX prepared to make history with the first flight of the

45:39

Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket.

45:42

But for Elon Musk, making history wasn't enough.

45:47

He wanted to payload as bold as the

45:53

rocket itself.

45:57

The answer became science fiction made real.

46:01

The reason for this show? The public tends to respond to precedents and

46:07

superlatives.

46:08

Be first, be best, and never ever be boring.

46:14

Spectacle was only part of the formula.

46:17

On a previous flight, SpaceX had just achieved another historic milestone.

46:22

The first private spacecraft ever to orbit Earth and return safely.

46:26

But Elon Musk had journalists talking about something else,

46:31

a secret payload.

46:33

After Dragon splashed down on December 8, 2010, a reporter asked Musk about that

46:39

mystery cargo. I'm going to leave that for the next news cycle.

46:44

The mystery lingered.

46:45

The next day, the secret was revealed.

46:49

A wheel of Le Brouère cheese,

46:52

a nod to a Monty Python sketch,

46:55

but the most powerful marketing force isn't stunts, it's the customers themselves.

47:01

In 2018's Model 3 delivery rush, podcaster Ryan McCaffrey tweeted,

47:07

a lot of Tesla owners including myself would be delighted to volunteer for free to

47:13

help with deliveries in times like this.

47:16

Musk replied,

47:17

wow, thanks.

47:19

Soon, Soon, owners were showing up at Tesla delivery centers,

47:23

not for perks, but to educate new buyers.

47:28

But Elon Musk didn't leave that enthusiasm to chance.

47:32

He amplified it using a playbook he had pioneered long before Tesla.

47:38

To grow PayPal, they made customers into recruiters.

47:42

$20 for new signups, $10 for referrals.

47:45

sales. Users ballooned from dozens to over a million in six months without a single

47:51

dollar spent on advertising.

47:53

Over a decade later, Tesla revived the same strategy by giving $1,000 to the

47:59

buyer and $1,000 to the referrer.

48:02

It turned every owner into a highly motivated sales force.

48:07

The key ingredient was trust.

48:09

Some marketing email from a company carries no weight.

48:13

From a friend carries high weight.

48:25

There is a version of the Elon Musk story that is entirely about one man.

48:31

His intelligence, his will, even his strangeness.

48:35

That story is fascinating, but it is completely useless to anyone who isn't Elon

48:41

Musk.

48:43

The version I've spent years documenting is different.

48:46

It is not about a person, it is about an operating system.

48:50

problem, one that can be studied, broken apart, and used by anyone.

48:58

You think from the physics of the problem, not the conventions of the industry.

49:03

You question every single requirement, delete before you optimize,

49:08

and never automate what you haven't already fixed.

49:12

You hire for raw obsession, not credentialed competence.

49:16

You hand your people problems bigger than anything they have ever solved before.

49:21

You forgive failure, and you ruthlessly fire cultural misalignment.

49:27

You lead from the front, and you take the biggest risk in the room yourself.

49:32

You move faster than anyone thinks is possible, and you let the pressure of an

49:37

impossible deadline force the radical simplifications that careful planning never

49:42

would.

49:43

You don't ask people what they want.

49:45

You build what first principle's dictate should exist.

49:49

Then, you listen intensely to everything once it's real.

49:55

And you make the product so extraordinary,

49:59

it sells itself.

50:03

This is not a flattering portrait of an easy process.

50:06

The people who built these companies worked brutal, exhausting hours that strained

50:11

marriages and sometimes severely damaged health.

50:14

Some loved it, some didn't survive it.

50:19

What? You can re-write the software right next to our space station.

50:23

For

50:33

that capsule,

50:34

the one approaching the space station with a failed sensor and six lives on the

50:39

line.

50:40

The update was pushed, the software worked.

50:44

Dragon berthed. And

50:46

SpaceX made history.

50:49

Over a decade, almost nobody on the outside understood how.

50:53

Now, you do.

50:56

The secrets are yours.

50:58

Apply them and go change the world.