I Finished the Elon Book

I just finished reading Elon Musk, a biography by Walter Isaacson. Well, I listened to it on Spotify since I get a number of audiobook credits every month with my subscription.

I’d listened to the Steve Jobs biography by the same author about 10 years ago and enjoyed that, so I figured I would see what all the fuss was about.

It was a great bio! Here are some of my takeaways.

I really loved the engineering stories

Gosh, I loved them. The book walks through Elon’s various startups but spends most of the time on Tesla and SpaceX.

One of my favorite things learning about SpaceX is that Elon literally just started reading books about rockets. He didn’t ask for permission or spend four years in school.

It reminds me that you can literally just do things. Go out and do the thing you want to do. Make it happen. Unless it’s, like, open heart surgery. You should probably have formal schooling for that stuff.

The Algorithm is super appealing

Elon references this thing he calls “The Algorithm” a bunch in his various companies:

1. Question every requirement: Kinda gives me “there are no rules” vibes. Forces you to break down exactly why you’re doing something (like adding a giant ugly sticker to the visor of a brand new Tesla model) and question whether it’s applicable or necessary.
2. Delete any part of the process you can. Goes hand in hand with the previous point. If you don’t have a good answer for why you need it, delete it. You aren’t deleting enough if you haven’t had to add back at least 10% of the stuff you removed.
3. Simplify and optimize. Complexity ruins everything and grows over the course of time. Make it simpler.
4. Accelerate cycle time. Make it quicker to do things, but only after you’ve done the first three things.
5. Automate. Gotta do it last. Make sure you’ve deleted and simplified all the things first.

These are so good. I want to apply these things all day every day to my engineering work, even if it’s not literal rocket science or self-driving cars.

As someone who recently joined a new team at work, “Question every requirement” is a really useful technique to get the lay of the land but also to suss out any old or outdated decisions which might be worth revisiting.

When I encounter complexity, I’m tempted to “delete things,” too. But at a big company, I’m somewhat limited in what I can accomplish without being a giant Musk-type figure who calls the shots. It’s also clear to me how much nuance and history is involved in each decision, so Chesterton’s fence, second order effects, yada yada.

Compounding deletions

One of my favorite examples of deleting and simplifying things from the book is related to rockets.

When you’re launching something into space, every pound of cargo including the rocket itself needs a corresponding amount of fuel to be able to get off the ground and reach orbit. This leads to a phenomenon of compounding effects: more cargo means more fuel, which makes the rocket heavier, which means more fuel, …

It’s true for the opposite direction, too: removing one thing from the rocket reduces the weight, which means less fuel is required, which reduces the weight, which means less fuel is required, …

I guess this concept is called “the tyranny of the rocket equation.”

This type of thing applies to non-rocket work more than we realize! By removing a requirement, you’re freeing up a person to work on other things, which means those other things get accelerated while the lack of burden of the thing you deleted also frees up a bunch of other people down the line.

Delete things, people. And add them back 10% of the time. Unless you’re a heart surgeon. Probably don’t delete the heart.

Mission and tenacity

I’m just impressed by the sheer tenacity it takes to build things. Rockets, self-driving cars, Starlink internet. Years and years of doubt and naysayers and hard work. It really fills me with drive to to go out and build something.

One of the reasons people go and work at Elon’s companies, pouring late night hours of sweat and tears into engineering, is because of the ambitious mission he’s set out to achieve.

For SpaceX, it’s getting to Mars. Super ambitious and bold. I totally get why people go dedicate their lives to making it happen.

For Tesla, it’s self-driving cars and the electric car revolution.

If you want to attract a bunch of really talented people to come put their heart and soul into your company, you need a huge North Star mission to get people excited. And Elon’s really good at that.

Surges and manic cycles

In the biography, the author attempts to form a connection between Elon’s cycles of manic episodes with “surges” at his companies. These were stretches of days or weeks where Elon would demand his employees work non-stop to achieve some goal, often attached to an arbitrary and nearly-impossible deadline.

Examples include:

• Getting production sorted out in a Tesla factory to hit a target number of models produced
• Working on a new rocket engine or stacking rocket parts on a launch pad

Elon would literally sleep at the factory during these times and walk through the production line. This allowed him to get familiar with the details of each of the production steps. He would frequently suggest changes to improve the process, like deletions or simplifications.

The book gave a few examples of these suggestions that ended up improving the system, but I’d imagine it would be frustrating as an employee to receive an Elon suggestion at 2am when it turns out to be a bad suggestion. But I’m familiar with tech CEOs being involved with the fine details of the product, and I think the positives vastly outweigh the negatives.

These “surges” generally had positive outcomes: a deadline was nearly met, and production was improved in a lot of areas. However, I’m not sure how necessary all of them were. I think Elon does this because he feels like it. It’s not rational many of the times, and it disrupts the lives of his employees. Just one of the things you have to come to expect working for him, I would imagine.

The Twitter stuff was a bummer

The last chunk of the book is about the Twitter drama around Elon’s attempted hostile takeover, walk-back, and eventual purchase and gutting of Twitter.

I was pretty bummed to learn that the whole Twitter purchase was essentially a mistake. It was something Elon did in the heat of the moment and regretted almost instantly. After all of the cool engineering stuff leading up to this point, it’s unfortunate that this decision had almost no long-term “mission” or purpose in the grand scheme of things.

He claims that it’s all about “free speech” and wants to kill the “woke mind virus” of censorship.

Was the Twitter moderation staff and corporate culture too skewed to the left before Elon took over? Yeah, probably.

But what Elon has done with Twitter (now X) since then is pretty hypocritical, including:

• Shadow-banning accounts of random popular web developers I follow, probably because of something they said or linked to at one point
• Delisting, de-ranking, or outright preventing links to Twitter competitors
• Random algorithm boosts built-in for Elon’s account
• The fact that I see all the Mr. Beast videos in my feed now as if it were an “Ad” (I don’t follow him) but it doesn’t say “Ad” because Elon wanted him to run videos on X and thus needed higher view counts, so there’s probably something in the codebase that runs it as an ad but prevents the UI from displaying it as an ad? I don’t know
• The fact that he’s all-in for Trump now and just reposts all this crap in favor of his political leanings. Makes it hard for me to take him seriously when he advocates for “free speech” while he has complete control of a platform

I don’t know. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth after being pretty inspired at the first part of the book. That’s life, though, baby!

Anyway, I thought it was a good read.

Oh, random fun fact. There are two guys who work at SpaceX with the same exact name: Joe Petrzelka. One is VP of Starship Engineering who reports directly to Elon, and he was in the marching band with me at Iowa State. The other works in government affairs, and he married a woman from my hometown in Iowa.

Small world. Definitely a simulation.