Elon Musk’s brutally honest management style
It&#x27;s interesting to now see Musk&#x27;s playbook since he&#x27;s started SO MANY (rather successful) companies at this point (with SpaceX and Tesla being huge gambles).<p>1. Hire passionate experts who do their jobs on the weekend as their personal hobbies (Tom Mueller, Straubel, Karpathy)<p>2. Give a &quot;we&#x27;re burning our ships&quot; speech (similar to Hernan Cortez and Tariq al Jabal, who both destroyed ships for the return voyage so their men had to engage in conquest). This is typically usually a lie. Witness Musk&#x27;s statements about SpaceX bankruptcy with Raptor2. When he started off, this was not a lie as he gambled his entire personal fortune and investors money on SpaceX and Tesla multiple times.<p>3. Create a culture of 110% hardship. No waiting in line for coffee. Everyone should be ready to go to the office at 3 am on a whim whether it&#x27;s necessary or not. Perhaps in the early years this build camaraderie, but eventually this will lead to burnout. No matter. Labor is replaceable. Filtering out the naval gazers and dead weight middle management is good not bad. And squeezing more units of labor out of each employee has worked since the days of the Babylonian Empire.<p>4. Only engineering matters. UX? Forget about it. DEI? Well Elon was always a closet republican. Marketing? Well, Musk-daddy controls Twitter now. Interestingly I tend to notice these jobs that are cut tend to have disproportionately greater percentages of women.<p>5. Simpler is better than complicated. This is the thing I respect most about Elon. The hard fought struggle to productionize Model 3 resulted in great simplification of the design and manufacturing process which is now being applied to mass production of rocketry. Instead of 20 wiring harnesses why not 1? Instead of 20 chips why not 1? Every manufacturing company should adopt this mentality. In a few months we will see if Elon prefers microservice versus monolith with Twitter. I&#x27;m going to guess the latter!<p>6. Sci-fi bullshit. Elon doesn&#x27;t actually have the capacity to deep dive into the science and engineering of the now 6-7 companies he operates. Witness his borderline idiotic anti-vaccination stance. Other than SpaceX and Tesla manufacturing, his talks on things like autopilot tends to veer into Star Trek references.<p>6. Dictator dictates. No committees. No long winded meetings. No waffling around hard decisions. Dictator Elon will decide.<p>7. Self promote. People forget this, but Musk goes out of his way to be on TV. Dude has made guest appearances on The Big Bang Theory, Rick and Morty, SNL, Colbert Show, South Park, and more. The celebrity of Musk is no accident even if he tries to play the role of &quot;an engineer who sleeps in the office and lives in a 50,000 dollar house&quot;<p>I think this playbook (particularly 1,2,3, and 5) would actually work for most startups while simultaneously creating unsustainable levels of toxicity. Ultimately all dictatorships (even the good ones) grow old and out of touch, and society will reorient it&#x27;s gaze and praise on some other eccentric billionaire...