Book Reflection: Elon Musk

Elon Musk is another person I look up to for inspiration, for the audacity he has in pursuing large, truly impactful problems, and his ability to actually deliver on these results.

I love his ability to reason from first principles (something I admired in my previous managers as well), and ground discussions and decision making in the fundamental laws of physics. When you are working with rockets and electric cars — making the impossible happen in a world of atoms — that is arguably the best way to make decisions. If physically possible, then it’s just a matter of figuring how to do it at a scale that makes it practically, financially possible as well.

In a way, that’s not too different from how a startup is built. PG’s advice on “do things that don’t scale” is fundamentally rooted as well in the sense that by figuring out the theoretical limits of what your business is, then you can always optimize it so the practical matches the theoretical. If you have a ridesharing business and there is demand and there is supply, and if you calculate the unit economics that it can work out, then that’s great. Go do that. And scale later.

It’s funny that most of the successful leaders, especially when it comes to tech, are known to be difficult people to work with. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, etc. I don’t think it’s intentional, but it’s their zest and their drive and their focus and their energy and their intensity that are hard for others to match. It’s not that Elon Musk is a demanding manager that orders people around while he sits in his cushy executive suite. No, quite the contrary. He does order people around, but he is there every Saturday and Sunday in the Tesla factory, crawling beneath cars to work on them. Arguably, he works more than anyone else at his companies. If anyone has the right to tell others to work more, he is definitely leading by example.

Believing in the future. Having a vision of the future. That I admire most about Elon Musk. He famously said that we are overindexed on Internet and underinvested in other tech, and that resonates so strongly with me. And he actually goes out there and does something about it.

Reading about him working does raise a question in myself, though. Do I want to change the world or live a comfortable life? Because you can’t change the world by being in a cushy comfortable place. Change does not come from complacency. And how do I balance my desire to do something great, to work on the cutting edge of technology, with my desire to enrich myself, to travel and explore?

Perseverance. That’s another quality I admire tremendously in Elon Musk.

Sacrifices. And the type of sacrifices he’s made in his personal life. The troughs that he went through. There’s definitely an element of luck playing nicely here as well. Can I do that? Am I willing to take that level of risk and sacrifice?

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I fully buy into his mission. I think it’s compelling, intuitive, and obvious. And looking at his detractors, I can’t help but to shake my head at how petty some people in this world are. And failing they are to recognize a visionary.

Elon Musk is special because he is not only a visionary, but more over a practitioner. He is a do-er, and has an array of accomplishments behind him. And he is personally invested, committed, in his ventures. Couple that with his relentless drive, how can he not be successful? I’m just thinking the executives behind Solyndra is probably calling it a day at 5pm and then attending some fancy fundraising event or hanging out at their mansions. None of that for Musk. At his level of success, there is not so much the as taking it easy, but rather he is still as committed as he ever was.

And he’s not afraid to challenge the status quo, thinking from first principles. And not scared to call BS and push away bad people and bad ideas from his life. He may not do it in the most delicate and empathetic ways, but nevertheless it is extremely effective.

I won’t be surprised if Elon Musk becomes the most successful person in 20 years time. Maybe not the most dominant; he doesn’t care about that. But one with tremendous business, technological, financial, and human-impact success.

The book — Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future