#399 How Elon Works

The biography of Elon Musk that was written by Walter Isaacson came out a few years ago. It's 615 pages long. And so I read the book for the first time when it came out, and I didn't think I can make a great episode about it. And I think I've now finally figured out what I really wanna talk to you about. It's it's gonna sound crazy because Elon is the richest person on the planet and the most famous entrepreneur alive. But I think that all of the other stuff, the politics, the tweets, the constant appearance in the news, or there's, like, you know, new controversies all the time. It just really distracts and takes away from the fact that Elon has a set of timeless and brilliant and insanely valuable principles on how to build companies, how to invent new technology, and how to make an impact on the world around you. And so this is what I did. I have spent at least at least sixty hours reading and rereading this book. This book is written in chronological order. So I would say it's more akin to reading a series of news reports over a few decades than the typical way a biography is written. And so as it turns out, that's gonna be a major asset for you and I because what you'll see and what I exclusively want to focus on is the enduring set of company building principles Elon has used over three decades and across at least seven companies. So it may be apocryphal, but there is a quote from Michelangelo when he was asked, like, how he created the statue of David. And he replied, I just chipped away everything that was not David. So what I've done is edited down my 40 pages of notes and highlights from the book into just the way that Elon works. I wanna focus on the ideas that he used to build his companies and to build what I think is a truly singular career. I don't think there's anyone else like him living or dead. And so I'm going to go through his ideas in chronological order so you can see how they appear, reappear, and how they are edited and iterated on over time. And so at the end of the episode or by the end of episode, I should say, it will be impossible for you not to understand how Elon works. And then what I think we both should do is we should sit with these ideas, write them down, and then think deeply about how we can apply some of them to our work. I think one of the superpowers of this project that has been going on for almost a decade where you and I get together every week and we talk about another one of History's greatest founders is that we see that somehow people that didn't know each other were alive at different points in …