I am a fan of Elon, and I am a fan of Naval. That is why I picked up “The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success”. A journey through his quotes and interviews. I found it fascinating. Particularly his focus on making things. Manufacturing is underrated. AI has commoditised nearly everything else. Building value is building things, not financing or managing them. And has been making a lot. Tunnels, satellites, rockets, robots, cars, batteries, and by doing so, has single-handedly transformed a number of industries.
Aspire to be Elon?
He is the richest man on Earth, an engineer, entrepreneur, and an immigrant who has taken massive personal risks to build new things that solve problems on a planetary—and interplanetary—scale. Maybe we should all aspire to be like Elon. His motto: If you want the future to be good, you must make it so. Take action to make it good, and it will be. He devotes myself to the advancement of humanity using technology. The question you should ask yourself: How many people you helped, multiplied by how much help you provided each person, on average. Are you fighting for the things that make you excited about the future? Are you making a difference?
The book is full of wisdom
- The economy is a positive-sum game, a “grow the pie” situation. Those who assume the economy is zero-sum believe the only way to get ahead is by taking things from another. It’s much better to work on adding to the economic pie. Create more than you consume.
- You must be extremely tenacious. Work like hell. You have to put in eighty- to one-hundred-hour weeks every week. This will improve your odds of success. Nobody ever changed the world on forty hours a week.
- Think like a Physicist. Physics is law. Everything else is a recommendation.
- Try to be hyperrational. If the reasoning fits, and you’re not violating the laws of physics, that’s the thing you should try to do.
- Start somewhere. Then be prepared to question your assumptions, fix what you did wrong, and adapt to reality.
- Be obsessed with truth.
- Look for feedback from all sources.
- Apply first-principles thinking. What is true at a foundational level?
- Stop wishful thinking
- There are significant technological differences around the world that even hardcore technologists are unaware of. What is simple in one arena is often profound in another
- Apply “The Idiot Index.” How much more does a finished product cost than the cost of its materials? If a part or product had a high Idiot Index, we could reduce costs by using more efficient manufacturing techniques.
- Aspire to be less wrong
- Read books, because the data rate of reading is much greater than when somebody is speaking. I encourage you to read a lot of books. Just read. Try to ingest as much information as you can. If you want to read up on books, click here. 12 free books about books about strategy, innovation, intrapreneurship, AI, future trends, and leadership. Each one distills the best thinking from dozens of business books into a single, actionable read.
- View knowledge as a semantic tree. Make sure you understand the fundamental principles (the trunk and big branches) before you get into the leaves (the details), then there is something for them to hang on to.
- Talk to people from different walks of life, industries, professions, and skill sets. Try to learn as much as possible. Search for meaning.
- Engineering is everything
- Play to win, or don’t play at all.
- You only build value in a company by working hard to solve tough problems. That’s why companies are valuable. It’s why they should be valuable, and largely why they are.
- There’s no point in spending time on things that are going right, so you only spend time on things that are going wrong. Specifically, the things other people can’t fix. The most pernicious and painful problems.
- Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do. Whatever the people at the front lines are doing, I try to do it at least a few times myself.
- It is my firm belief that separating the workplace into “executives” and “employees” does not create a good working environment.
- Managers should always take care of their team before they take care of themselves. The supervisor is there to serve his team, not the other way round.
- A major failure mode is a high ego-to-ability ratio. If your ego-to-ability ratio gets too high, then you’ve broken the feedback loop to reality.
- Failure is not good. Failure is bad. But if something is important enough, then you do it, even though the risk of failure is high.
- Many people fear starting a company too much. What’s the worst that could happen? You’re not gonna starve to death; you’re not gonna die of exposure—really, what’s the worst that could happen?
- Once you’ve been punched in the face, real hard, right on the nose—you’ll take any words over that.
- The most important thing is to attract great people. Whether you are creating a company or joining a company, find an amazing group that you really respect.
- A company is just a bunch of people coming together to create a product or service. There’s no such thing as “a business,” just a group pursuing a goal.
- Fundamentally, if you don’t have a compelling product at a compelling price, you don’t have a great company.
- Create a culture of builders
- A small group of technically strong people will always beat a large group of moderately strong people
- Recruit for exceptional ability
- My philosophy for companies in the startup phase is a “Special Forces” approach. The minimum passing grade is excellent
- When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.
- Physics does not care about hurt feelings. It cares about whether you got the rocket right. I think it’s a real weakness to want to be liked. A real weakness.
- Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command.”
- Always view yourself as working for the good of the company and never your department
- You cannot separate design, engineering, and manufacturing.
- Physically go to where the problem is, immediately.
- Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic.
- When trying new things, you’ve got to accept failure… failure must be an option. If failure is not an option, it’s going to result in extremely conservative choices, and you may get something even worse than lack of innovation—things may go backward.
- You will lose. It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.
- Simplicity wins. Simplicity is our mantra. It creates both reliability and low cost.
- The best part is no part. The best process is no process.
- Apply maniacal urgency. Speed is both offense and defense. The only true currency is time. The power of speed is underappreciated as a competitive factor.
- If your rate of innovation is high, then you don’t need to worry about protecting the IP because other companies will be copying something you did years ago. That’s fine. Just make sure your rate of innovation is fast. Speed of innovation is what matters.
- The longer you do anything, the more mistakes you will make, cumulatively. If you sum up just the mistakes, it sounds like I’m the worst predictor ever, which is not the case.
- Do not worry too much about intellectual property paperwork. Be incredibly obsessive about building the best possible customer experience.
- The best way to experience service is, of course, to not need service.
- Most people don’t consciously notice the small details, but they do subconsciously.
- Focus on signal over noise
- Go for extreme levels of precision.
- Read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.
Not rocket science (pun intended). If you have read “Exponential organisations,” you will recognise the playbook. Applying all the lessons. Consistently and more importantly, successfully.
Tesla
The overarching purpose of Tesla is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy toward a solar-electric economy. Humanity will solve sustainable energy if we continue to push hard. The future is bright for cheap, abundant energy. When Tesla was ready to scale Powerwall (our home battery for energy storage) and SolarCity was ready to provide a differentiated solar system for energy generation, the time had come to bring them together Our other goal at Tesla is to make a useful humanoid robot as quickly as possible.
SpaceX
The original idea for SpaceX wasn’t to create a company. It was to figure out why we hadn’t sent people to Mars. When I started SpaceX, it was not with the expectation of success. I thought the most likely outcome was failure. I mean, I mind losing money, but it’s not like I was trying to figure out the rank-ordered best way to invest my money and on that basis chose space. I didn’t think, “I could do real estate, or invest in shoemaking, and—whoa! Space has the highest ROI!” That was not my premise.
To become multiplanetary, the breakthrough we need to create is a rapidly reusable interplanetary transport system. This is right on the edge of impossible. That’s the breakthrough SpaceX is really trying to achieve. What we’ve done so far is good; it’s better. But it has been evolutionary—not yet revolutionary. We need the revolutionary thing to work. Ultimately we’re aiming for the ability to produce a thousand ships a year.
Neuralink
Neuralink is trying to help solve brain injuries and the existential risk of AI. Will the brain–computer interface change humans and how we use computers? Yes, an intertwined idea is having a higher-bandwidth interface between computers and the brain. We’re currently bandwidth-limited. The Neuralink interface can massively increase your output bandwidth and your input bandwidth.
Blindsight
This is actually our second product, called Blindsight. It enables people who are completely blind, lost both eyes or optic nerve, or just can’t see at all, to be able to see by directly triggering the neurons in the visual cortex
The Boring Company
The Boring Company is trying to save people’s time by solving traffic, which is hell for most people.
Starlink
You could be deep in the Amazon jungle with a Starlink terminal and have access to more information than the US president did in 1980.
Some trend predictions (you should take note)
- Synthetic RNA is revolutionary in medicine. Most people are not aware just how much of a revolution this is. This is like medicine going from analog to digital
- AI and robotics will bring about what might be termed “the age of abundance.”
- In the future, the only forms of scarcity will be artificial scarcity (where we decide to make something scarce, like a particular piece of art) or unique items, like a particular home in a specific location.
- The market for humanoid robots will be bigger than that of cars. Eventually, there will be millions of them. Long term, I think the ratio of humanoid robots will be more than one-to-one. There might be two humanoid robots per person or more, maybe ten for every one. Well in excess of ten billion humanoid robots. At volume production, a humanoid robot will cost less than a car
- Exponential intelligence computing power is going to be crazy. The big change is the cost of computing power, not so much the circuit density. If you look at dollars per instruction, cost is dropping exponentially.
- The ratio of total digital compute to total biological compute is the key metric to watch.
- Eventually we humans will represent a small percentage of total intelligence. It might feel like we’re the biological bootloader for AI.
- People don’t appreciate this yet—they are already a cyborg. You’re a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago, or even ten years ago.
- Eventually, self-driving cars will take the form of a shared autonomous fleet.
- The future of energy will be primarily solar with wind. We absolutely need stationary storage batteries because of the intermittency of both solar and wind. There will also be hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear—these are all good.
- We could probably have a civilization that is a hundred times as energy intensive as we currently have it
The master plan
The thing we wanted to convey, more importantly than anything else, is that there is a clear path to a sustainable-energy Earth. Second is to make life multiplanetary. This will help preserve the light of consciousness.
The ultimate message to entrepreneurs
You are living in the most exciting time in history. You are the magicians of the twenty-first century; don’t let anything hold you back. Imagination is the limit. Go out there and create some magic.
