How Elon Musk Gets So Much Done - Marc Andreessen

how is Elon so productive have you ever deconstructed this so actually I've known Elon for a long time I didn't work with him um uh for a very long time just we working on you know different different different things um but I've been working with him quite closely for the last couple years um starting with the X acquisition um and then um and then we've also invested in xai and in in SpaceX and so we We Now work on on three companies together to different degrees and now the the government the government stuff um yeah

I mean he there there's basically he has an method that he's developed um that I would say is very unusual by modern standards um I'm actually I'm not aware of another current CEO who operates the way that he does and I think probably the single biggest kind of question in all of business right now is why don't we CEOs operate the way that he does and it's a complicated question we could talk about um but um if you go back in history you find characters um more like him and so um especially like the industrialists

of the late 1800s early 1900s um you know people like Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie or Thomas who built IBM if you go back and read the biographies of of people like that Andrew melon you know those guy Cornelius Vanderbuilt like those guys ran very similar to the way that that that Elon Elon runs things and it's just this like the top Topline thing is just this incredible devotion uh from the leader of the company to fully deeply understand what the company does and to be you know completely knowledgeable about every aspect of it and

to be in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work uh deeply understanding the issues and you know being the key the lead Problem Solver in the organization and basically what Elon does is he shows up every week at each of his companies um he identifies the biggest problem that the company's having that week and he fixes it right and then and then he does that every week for 52 weeks in a row and then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year like in that year and

you know most other large companies are still having the planning meeting for the pre-planning meeting for the board meeting for the presentation for the this for the you know with the compliance review and the legal review and like so so he's just like it's it's this it's this level of both like incredible intellectual capability coupled with Incredible force of Personality moral Authority execution capability focus on fundamentals um that um is just like really amazing to watch and then by the way the the side effect of it um is he attracts you know many of the

best people in the world to work with him um because if you work with Elon like the expectations are through the roof in terms of your level of performance and he is going to know who you are and he is going to know what you've done and he's going to know what you've done this week um and he's going to know if you're under performing and he may fire you in the meeting um if uh you're not if you're not if you're not carrying your weight but if you're if you are as committed to the

company as he is and working hard and capable many people who have worked for for him say that they had the best experience of their lives when they were working for him and so then there's this this attraction thing and and and that's why I think his companies compound the way they do is because they just because of this they just keep bring they're a black hole that sucks in the best talent if you're the best in the world you want to work harder than anybody else come here that's right and people look at this

from the outside and they're like how can people Toler you know all the criticisms how can they tolerate this guy and and inside the company people are like finally I get to work yeah somebody gets it somebody uh somebody there's a famous Li somebody used to work in one of the other defense space aerospace companies and went to work at SpaceX and said he was asked what it was like and he said it's like being dropped into a shocking zone of competence right it's just like it's just like exactly your point like everybody around me

is like so absolutely comp competent and and and Mo and look most of most people most of us never have that experience you know most people are never in an organization where like the the bar is held that high and as a consequence as a consequence the competence level is so high and stays so high and even Rises over time um and he and he's and and again too his master credit he has been able to do that repeatedly so detail oriented focusing on everything from a toz in terms of the business sort of intimately

familiar with it and prepared to get his hands dirty from a I will get in there and actually look at solving the problem myself so is that you know that suggests to me although this can't be the case because you couldn't run this many companies if you were doing it this way um there may be some challenges in learning when to delegate uh when to hand off tasks because in order to get that level of uh resolution to be able to see things with that that much finitude uh you also need to spend a lot

of time on it and then if you're solving the problems how do you choose the problems that are yours to solve and the problems that aren't so on and so forth so that must be that must must be a challenge delineating between what is my problem to solve and what is somebody else's yeah so I say most leaders like most CEOs we work with have exactly that problem for exactly the reasons you described I think the Elon method is a little bit different and I don't know if you'd agree with this but the way I

I think about it is he actually delegates almost everything um like he's not involved in most of the things that his companies are doing he's involved in the thing that is the biggest problem right now until that thing is fixed and then he doesn't have to be involved in anymore and then he can go focus on the next thing that's the biggest problem for that company right now so like like for example manufacturing there's this concept of the bottleneck right and so in any manufacturing chain there there's always some bottleneck there's always something that is

keeping the manufacturing line from running the way that it's supposed to and sometimes the bottleneck is up is at the beginning of the process it's like we can't get enough raw material sometimes the bottleneck is at the end of the process we don't have enough warehouses for the finished product or the bottleneck might be somewhere in the middle and if you run a Manufacturing Company there's always a bottleneck whatever the bottleneck is is holding everything up um and and and you you the job number one is to remove that bottleneck and get everything flowing and

I I think he basically has universalized that concept and he basically looks at every company like it's you know some sort of conceptual assembly line sometimes a literal assembly line you know making cars and Rockets and and basically any given week There's a bottleneck there's guaranteed to there's guaranteed to be the main bottleneck there's going to be one thing that's going to be the thing that's holding people back and and so the answer to your question the resolution of the Paradox is I'm going to micromanage the solution of that I don't need to manage everything

else because everything else by definition is running better than that right and so I can go focus on that the other part of it is so compelling and this is where I think a lot of especially non-technical CEOs would really struggle to implement the method is he really when he identifies the bottleneck he goes and he talks to the line Engineers who understand the technical nature of the bottleneck um and if it's people on a manufacturing line he's talking to people directly on the line or if that's people in a software development group he's talking

to the people actually writing the code right so so he's not asking the VP of engineering to ask the director of engineering to ask the manager to ask the individual contributor to write a report for you know that's to be reviewed in three weeks he doesn't do that he would like throw them all out of the window there's just no way he would do that what he does is he goes and he goes and personally finds the engineer who actually has the knowledge about the thing and then he sits in the room with that engineer

and fixes the problem with them right and again this is why he inspires such incredible loyalty from the from the especially the technical people who he works with which is they're just like wow if I if I if I'm up against a problem I don't know how to solve freaking musk I can call on the guy that owns the fre Elon Musk is going to show up in his golf stream and he's going to sit with me in the overnight in front of the keyboard or in front of the manufacturing line and he's going to

help me figure this out wow right and so it's like how do you possibly like how can yeah and this is the thing it's like okay you're like a normal CEO running a normal company like how can you possibly compete with that um what are the other reasons that uh CEOs of similar companies or comparable companies don't do that technical uh understanding I get that that you need to be able to get your hands 30ty from a a specificity perspective but what else yeah so like so that's a lot that that is a lot of

it and that's a that's a topic that makes people really mad because you um non-technical people really hate being told that they are not qualified to do something because they're not technical but every now and then the technical details actually do matter so there's there's a whole domain there and you know most managers you know it's like most people in government are lawyers you know most people in in in in business and in senior levels are MBA like and so there there's a there's a there's a you know most large companies are not run by

Engineers right they're run by business business people and so there's a or increasingly lawyer increasingly also lawyers um uh and so um you know there is a real challenge there and then I I just think more generally uh more generally it's just the way that management is taught um and you know most classically in the form of something like a Harvard Business School or Stanford Business School it's basically taught it's basically management as it was sort of developed and implemented I would say in like the 1950s 6070s it was sort of the so-call scientific School

of Management and so it's basically management as a generic skill that you can apply to any industry um and you know you could manage a Soup company or you could manage a you know I don't know whatever whatever whatever kind of company and they're kind of all the same and it kind of doesn't matter what they do and there's a common set of management practices and and it has you know is a lot to do it's you know process um it's you know how do you structure you know the how do you the manage the

balance sheet how do you set the review schedule for the meetings how do you do compliance how do you you know hire you know how do you manage a uh you know how do you hire and motivate Executives um you know how do you resolve interpersonal conflicts like all these like General business skills and by the way those General business skills are you know very useful in L in lots of contexts um it's just that that that training doesn't give you any of the inform that training gives you none of what you need to go

do what Elon does um and then and then Elon push I would say he pushes it as far as he can and not doing all the stuff that you're classically trained to do so that he can spend all of his time doing the things that only he can do which it turns out has this like just like incredible you know C catalytic multiplicative effect where his companies are you know so just incredibly amazing he Elon just said this thing at the most recent Tesla event um that blew my mind you know because his companies are

famous they don't they don't actually have like marketing departments like like Tesla doesn't spend any money on sales and marketing like they don't they don't sell the cars like every other car company in the world is like running all these ad campaigns all the time TV commercials and the you know newspaper flyers and the quarterly you know sales events and like all this crazy stuff and promotions all these things like Tesla doesn't do any of that it's just like it's the it's you know it's the best car and you just like show up and buy

it or not it's up to you you're more on if you don't right like it's D my my dad went to go and test drive Model S maybe a couple of years ago and he's sort of an old school car guy and he's used to the the sort of banter back and forth the for courts the discussion they please sit down would you like a coffee would you like you know what what is it and he said that he walked in and it felt like he gotone into an Apple store and there was some as

he called it teenager in a hoodie uh that came out and my dad started to do the whole like classic Boomer parent negotiation thing and this guy was like the price is the price and I don't have any [ __ ] coffee for you so he he left he left feeling uh like this is the new world and now he has a a Range Rover so uh yeah well that's the thing it's like do you want the best car in the world or not right like that's elon's mentality right and and and it's working very

well and then he at this event he just he took it to the next level and this broke my brain I'm still thinking about it he said if you think about it he said the best product in the world shouldn't even need a logo like you shouldn't even have to have your name on the product people can just identify it from how good it is it's just obvious it's just obvious he did right it's just obvious everybody knows because it's the best product in the world everybody has it everybody uses it and like of course

you don't need to put the name on it everybody knows right and so for a minute I was like all right is this like a Zen you know thing that I and and then I was like no he's actually as usual with Elon it's like no he's actually serious um the best product the world would not need your name on it yeah um and and so yeah anyway so it's just this like completely different um it's just this completely different method and then and then on top of that to have the guy who's on top

of his game you know uh to you know to as you said to kind of be working on the government Challenge and then to be you know to have have the new pres you know for whatever people think of the new president pros and cons like to have him fully you know fully signed up embracing you know Elon and encouraging him to do this is a really I mean this this has not you have to go back like literally the last time something like this happened in in the United States government was was literally like

1933 this is this the closest analogy to what what at least has started to happen is is is is literally what happened under FDR which is just like a fundamental reinvention of how government works and like this massive influx of talent um from actually from the private sector that is able to just like do things that are unimagined and so it's you know it's it's a Once in an 80 years thing I'm you know I'm doing everything I can to help and I hope it goes you know pouring some kerosene onto the fire as you

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