Operating philosophy
- Relentlessly focused on weekly progress
- The Elon method boiled all the way down is “what have you gotten done this week?”
- Rejects traditional corporate timelines and long-term planning over months and years
Engineering-first approach
- Works predominantly with engineers
- Personally understands all technical systems
- Avoids non-engineering meetings/conversations when possible, joins all the core engineering focused meetings
- Skips management layers completely
- Talks directly to person in charge of specific project
- He’s in there with 24-year-old engineers and they’ll just walk through fire for him
- Engineers deeply respect his technical knowledge
Weekly problem-solving method
- Identifies key bottleneck at each company weekly
- Works directly with engineers to fix it that same week
- Maintains this pace across multiple companies simultaneously
- Late night work sessions are normal
Rapid iteration
- Embraces public failure as learning opportunity
- SpaceX:
- Ran through five rocket generations of which four would fail but he would learn so much that the fifth one would work
- Would go through the five generations faster than his rocket competitors could do one generation
- Willing to have rockets explode in testing
- Doesn’t let public perception slow progress
First principles thinking
- Gets to fundamental reality quickly
- Eliminates unnecessary processes
- Focuses purely on substance
- Rejects traditional corporate structure
- No Powerpoint presentations
- Minimal documentation