I just finished reading Elon Musk’s autobiography written by Walter Isaacson, the author of Steve Jobs’ autobiography, which I also read and thoroughly enjoyed a few years ago. I am not going to recap his life story in this post, but I will go over what I found to be most interesting.

Reality Distortion Field

Elon “suffers” from what some people refer to as a reality distortion field. He sets what many perceive to be totally unrealistic deadlines and targets. Surprisingly, these targets often create an optimal amount of pressure where people come together and deliver what previously seemed to be impossible. For example, relocating Twitter servers from one data center to another within days, as opposed to six months, thus saving millions in costs.

Requirements Origin

He continuously questions the origin of requirements to understand why they exist and what purpose they serve. It’s not enough of an answer to say that the requirement comes from a legal or infosec department.

You need to reach out to the person who made the requirement, talk to them, and then decide whether that requirement makes sense or not. Without questioning the norms, we risk becoming much slower, getting bogged down in unnecessary checks and controls instead of innovating and moving forward.

Mission Statement

His decisions are largely driven by his overarching mission: running six companies, each contributing directly towards his ultimate goal of becoming a multiplanetary species by colonizing Mars.

Why is it important to have a very clear mission statement? Because it helps you allocate your time and resources on what’s most important.

Key Performance Indicators

In order to deliver your mission, you must implement and track KPIs. For example, setting a KPI to build 5,000 Tesla cars per week meant that the company could become profitable by a certain date.

Another example is a KPI of driving down the cost of getting a payload to orbit. The industry average at the time was around $10,000 per kilogram of payload. Having and meeting a KPI of reducing that cost to under $3,000 ensures the company’s profitability and future growth.

Delete, Delete, Delete

It’s relatively easy to build something complex and over-engineered. Usually, the higher the complexity, the higher is the cost of build and maintenance. It’s much more difficult to build a solution that is both elegant and effective.

When faced with something incredibly expensive and complex, Elon questions all the norms and starts to delete components until he’s deleted so much that some need to be introduced back in. He refers to this approach as an “algorithm” and has successfully applied it at SpaceX and Tesla.

Fail Fast

Failure is where most learning takes place. Therefore, failure is good, but only as long as you can learn from it. Companies that are too risk-averse and never fail end up being too slow and ineffective in the long term. This is a core principle of the LEAN startup, yet many companies fail to adopt it and lag behind those that do. Some see a rocket blow up and call it a complete failure. Elon sees a rocket blow up and calls it a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” with lots of insights to learn from.

Hire and Keep 10x Engineers

Elon and his team let go of 90% of Twitter engineers by relying on the experience and judgment of their hardcore Tesla and SpaceX teams who have been with him for many years. Tesla AI (which is arguably a much more difficult problem to solve than a microblogging platform) only had a team of 150 engineers working on it when Twitter had a team in excess of 2000+ engineers.

If you want to be innovative and move fast, you must hire the best talent you can get. Unfortunately, many companies fail to accept the fact that it’s worth paying someone double the market rate as their productivity will be ten times that of an average engineer.

Don’t Tweet at Night

The more people depend on you and the more influential you are, the more considerate you need to be with what you say and how you say it. This is where Elon has continuously struggled throughout his life, partly due to his Asperger’s syndrome. At times, his outbursts brought good luck and fortune, but more often than not, he ended up rattling many feathers and losing billions in the process.