Part two of what stood out to me from Isaacson’s most recent biography.

Emphasis on making decisions, and demanding of others, to remove steps and items early and often.

At one point Musk noticed that the assembly line was being slowed at a station where strips of fiberglass were glued to the battery packs by an expensive but slow robot. The robot’s suction cups kept dropping the strip and it applied too much glue. “I realized that the first error was trying to automate the process, which was my fault because I pushed for a lot of automation,” he says.

After much frustration, Musk finally asked a basic question: “What the hell are these strips for?” He was trying to visualize why fiberglass pieces were needed between the battery and the floor pan.

The engineering team told him that it had been specified by the noise reduction team to cut down on vibration. So he called the noise reduction team, which told him that the specification came from the engineering team to reduce the risk of fire. “It was like being in a Dilbert cartoon,” Musk says. So he ordered them to record the sound inside a car without the fiberglass and then with the fiberglass.

“See if you can tell the difference,” he told them.

They couldn’t.

——

Throughout the spring and early summer of 2018, he prowled the factory floor, like he had in Nevada, making decisions on the fly. “Elon was going completely apeshit, marching from station to station,” says Juncosa. Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor. “At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later,” he said. “But if I don’t make decisions, we die.”

—-

Consequences of dramatic cutting and moving quickly.

“Unless a sensor is absolutely needed to start an engine or safely stop an engine before it explodes, it must be deleted,” he wrote in an email to SpaceX engineers. “Going forward, anyone who puts a sensor (or anything) on the engine that isn’t obviously critical will be asked to leave.”

Some of the managers objected. They felt that Musk was compromising safety and quality in order to rush production. The senior director for production quality left. A group of current and former employees told CNBC that they were

“pressured to take shortcuts to hit aggressive Model 3 production goals.” They also said they were pushed to make patchwork fixes, such as repairing cracked plastic brackets with electrical tape. The New York Times reported that workers felt pressure to work ten-hour days. “It’s a constant How many cars have we built so far?’ —a constant pressure to build,” one worker told the paper. There was some truth to the complaints. Tesla’s injury rate was 30 percent higher than the rest of the industry.

—-

Stories of grit that make you want to run outside and build something.

That afternoon, Tesla workers began clearing away the rubble that covered an old parking lot behind the factory. There was not time to pave over the cracked concrete, so they simply paved a long strip and began erecting a tent around it. One of Musk’s ace facilities builders, Rodney Westmoreland, flew in to coordinate the construction, and Teller rounded up some ice-cream trucks to hand out treats to those working in the hot sun. In two weeks, they were able to complete a tented facility that was 1,000 feet long and 150 feet wide, big enough to accommodate a makeshift assembly line. Instead of robots, there were humans at each station.

One problem was that they did not have a conveyor belt to move the unfinished cars through the tent. All they had was an old system for moving parts, but it was not powerful enough to move car bodies. “So we put it on a slight slope, and gravity meant it had enough power to move the cars at the right speed,” Musk says.

At just after 4 p.m. on June 16, just three weeks after Musk came up with the idea, the new assembly line was rolling Model 3 sedans out of the makeshift tent. Neal Boudette of the New York Times had come to Fremont to report on Musk in action, and he was able to see the tent going up in the parking lot. “If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible,” Musk told him, “then unconventional thinking is necessary.”

——

Over the previous weeks, Musk had been cycling through periods of despair and fury about the Starship’s Raptor engine. It had become complex, expensive, and difficult to manufacture.

“When I see a tube that cost twenty thousand dollars, I want to stab my eye with a fork,” he said.

Every week he went over the most recent timetables and expressed, often rather strongly, his dissatisfaction. “Pretend we are a startup about to run out of money,” he said at one of these sessions.

“Faster. Faster! Please mark anytime a date has slipped. All bad news should be given loudly and often. Good news can be said quietly and once.”

——

The algorithm

1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement.

Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.

2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.

3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.

4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.

5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.

—-

Elon’s impulsiveness

Tweeting “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” Which violated the SEC rule that the executives of public companies must warn the stock exchange ten minutes before any announcement that might cause market volatility.

—-

His hot-shot lawyer Alex Spiro argued to the jury, “Elon Musk is just an impulsive kid with a terrible Twitter habit.” It was an effective defense strategy that had the added virtue of being true.

—-

Henry Kissinger once quoted an aide saying that the Watergate scandal had happened “because some damn fool went into the Oval Office and did what Nixon told him to do.” Those around Musk knew how to ride out his periods of demon mode. Roth later described the encounter in a conversation with Birchall. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Birchall told him.

“That happens with Elon. You need to just ignore…”

—-

The moderator asked what advice he would give to someone who wanted to be the next Elon Musk. “I’d be careful what you wish for,” he replied. “I’m not sure how many people would actually like to be me. The amount that I torture myself is next level, frankly.”

—

A day in the life of

—April 6, 2022—he was preparing for the opening of Giga Texas, and he had spent the morning doing an intense inspection walk on the Model Y assembly line and approving the details of the Giga Rodeo party being planned.

It was also the day of his conference call with White House officials on trade, China, and battery subsidies. And then there was the issue that was taking up most of his mind-space that day: an offer he had just accepted, but was having second thoughts about, to join the board of a company whose stock he had been secretly accumulating since January.