Thoughts on Elon Musk (book) by Walter Isaacson

A great biography takes a legendary figure and exposes their humanity. It reminds us that even the most impactful and influential people often have humbling beginnings and many failures in their journey. That’s the case with this book by Walter Isaacson. He’s taken us deep into Musk’s life and given us some insight into how messy his life is.

After finishing this book, there are a few ideas and themes that continue to resonate and are worth sharing. The first is the Algorithm.

The Algorithm

At any given production meeting, whether at Tesla or SpaceX, there is a nontrivial chance that Musk will intone, like a mantra, what he calls “the algorithm”.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, Page 284.

If there’s anything repetitive about this book, it’s how often the algorithm is brought up. Even when it isn’t explicitly mentioned, it’s working in the background.

Steps of the Algorithm

1. Question every requirement
   1. Every requirement should come with the name of the person who made it. Never accept a requirement from a department.
   2. The smarter the person, the stronger you should question their necessity.
   3. Make requirements less dumb.
2. Delete any part of process you can
   1. Going too far is better than not going far enough. If you don’t end up adding 10% or more back, you haven’t gone far enough.
3. Simplify and optimize
   1. Don’t optimize something that should have been deleted.
   2. Only do after step 2.
4. Accelerate cycle time
   1. Every process can be sped up.
   2. The only way to consistently do this is to apply the previous steps of the algorithm.
   3. This was often Musk’s main goal. He was big on getting costs down by developing economies of scale. You get economies of scale by being able to produce faster.
5. Automate
   1. Always comes last, after the other steps have been applied.

Two other things that often came along with the algorithm: