Book Notes – Elon Musk

Since we live in more sensitive times I feel the need to state that these notes do not indicate agreement or endorsement – only that they were of interest for one reason or another.

One Easter, they made chocolate eggs, wrapped them in foil, and sold them door-to-door. Kimbal came up with an ingenous scheme. Instead of selling them cheaper than the Easter eggs at the store, they made them more expensive. “Some people would balk at the price,” he says, “but we told them, ‘You’re actually supporting future capitalists.’” (p27) – Value isn’t just based on the cost of materials and production.

True product people have a compulsion to sell directly to consumers, without middlemen muddying things up… He became frustrated by Zip2’s strategy of relegating itself to being an unbranded vendor to the newspaper industry. “We wound up beholden to the papers”. (p65)

Musk restructured the company so that there was not a separate engineering department… Separating the design of a product from its engineering was a recipe for dysfunction. Designers had to feel the immediate pain of if something they designed was hard to engineer. (p79)

“Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order to make it work financially … that’s what makes him a force of nature”. (p93)

He found it surprising – and frightening – that technological progress was not inevitable. It could stop. It could even backslide… Ancient Egyptians learned how to build the pyramids, but then that knowledge was lost. The same happened to Rome, which built aqueducts and other wonders that were lost in the Dark Ages. (p93)

It was fortunate that the (Russian) meetings went badly. It prodded Musk to think bigger. Rather than merely using a secondhand rocket to put a demonstration greenhouse on Mars, he would conceive a venture that was far more audacious, one of the most audacious of our times: privately building rockets that could launch satellites and then humans into orbit and eventually send them to Mars and beyond. “I was pretty mad, and when I get mad I try to reframe the problem.” (p99, em mine)

This led him to develop what he called an “idiot index,” which calculated how much more costly a finished product was than the cost of its basic materials. If a product had a high idiot index, its cost could be reduced significantly by devising more efficient manufacturing techniques. (p99)

The problem with a cost-plus system, he argued, was that it stymied innovation. If the project went over budget, the contractor would get paid more. There was little incentive for the cozy club of cost-plus contractors to take risks, be creative, work fast, or cut costs… SpaceX pioneered an alternative in which private companies bid on performing a specific task or mission… The company risked its own capital, and it would be paid only if and when it delivered on certain milestones. This outcomes-based, fixed-price contracting allowed the private company to control, within broad parameters, how its rockets were designed and built… “It rewards results rather than waste,” Musk says. (p123)

“It’s not the product that leads to success. It’s the ability to make the product efficiently. It’s about building the machine that builds the machine. In other words, how do you design the factory?” (p157)

“If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible, then unconventional thinking is necessary.” (p283)

The Algorithm & corollaries: (p284-286)

1. Question every requirement
2. Delete any part or process you can
3. Simplify and optimise
4. Accelerate cycle time
5. Automate

• All technical managers must have hands-on experience
• Camaraderie is dangerous
• It’s OK to be wrong; just don’t be confident and wrong
• Never ask people to do something you’re not willing to do
• Whenever there are problems to solve… do a skip level…
• Skills can be taught; look for people with the right attitude
• Operate on a maniacal sense of urgency
• Rules are dictated by physics; everything else is a recommendation.

Space was a personal passion for both men (Musk & Bezos), and their competition – like that of the railway barons a century earlier – would serve to push the field forward. (p354)

Musk believed that innovation was driven by setting clear metrics, such as cost per ton lifted into orbit or average number of miles driven on Autopilot without human intervention. (p355)

His goal was to get the cost of each engine to around $200,000, a tenth of what it then cost… (in) a small meeting one afternoon with the person in the finance department in charge of overseeing Raptor costs… Musk began “You are not the friend of the engineers. You are the judge. If you’re popular among the engineers, this is bad.” (p362)

Musk’s lofty goals are usually accompanied by practical business models. He had developed Starlink satellites, for example, as a way to fund SpaceX’s mission to Mars. Likewise, he planned for Neuralink brain chips to be used to help people with neurological problems, such as ALS, interact with computers. (p400)

When things were most dire, he got energised. It was the siege mentality from his South African childhood… It prompted him to launch surges, stir up dramas, throw himself into battles he could have bypassed… (p410)

Polytopia Life Lessons: (p426-427)

• Empathy is not an asset
• Play life like a game
• Do not fear losing
• Be proactive
• Optimise every turn
• Double down
• Pick your battles
• Unplug at times

Despite sharing Musk’s libertarian views on free speech, Howery pushed back gently with some sophisticated thoughts, posed as gentle questions. (p447)

…when he visits China, he is often asked how that country can be more innovative. “The answer I give is to challenge authority.” (p476)

“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.” (p521)

De-amplification research (p529)

“I’m a big believer that a small number of exceptional people who are highly motivated can do better than a large number of people who are pretty good and moderately motivated.” (p547)

“New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach” (p554)

“If a timeline is long, it’s wrong.” (p582) – story of the data centre move.