How Elon Musk Thinks About AI, Wealth, and Multiplanetary Life | Eric Jorgenson

Summary

Podcast Summary: BigDeal with Codie Sanchez

Episode: How Elon Musk Thinks About AI, Wealth, and Multiplanetary Life | Eric Jorgenson
Guest: Eric Jorgensen (author, "The Book of Elon")
Date: June 17, 2026

---

Overview

In this episode, Codie Sanchez interviews Eric Jorgensen, author of "The Book of Elon," about what makes Elon Musk one of the most distinctive entrepreneurs of our time. The conversation explores Musk’s mindset, risk-taking, operating systems, and the lessons anyone can draw from his approach to mission-driven work, speed, focus, creativity, and leadership. Packed with tactical insights and memorable anecdotes, the episode offers a rich, unfiltered look into the operating manual and philosophy that Musk has honed across Tesla, SpaceX, and more.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Elon Musk’s Mission-Driven Risk Taking

Timestamps: [00:03], [02:15], [12:51], [13:56]

• Risk as Purpose: Musk is “so mission driven that whether it’s a tenth of a percent chance or a 1% chance that SpaceX was going to succeed, he didn’t care. He’s like, I’m just going to do it. This mission matters and even if I fail, I will have been proud…” (Eric, [00:03])
• 2008 Story: During the lowest point, Musk split his last $30M between SpaceX and Tesla rather than let one die. His peers said to choose, but “He describes it as holding a kid in each hand off a cliff…and he couldn’t bear to let either one die.” (Eric, [02:15])
• Canonical Risk-taking: “He is just so product and mission driven that he makes financially insane decisions all the time…Money is an outcome of their passion for the mission.” (Eric, [12:51])

---

2. Embracing & Learning from Mistakes

Timestamps: [04:44], [06:13], [46:02]

• Mistakes as Necessity: “If you’re not adding back 10% of what you removed, you’re not removing enough.” (Eric, [04:44])
• Small Failures: Musk encourages rapid, intentional small failures—“Push something to the point of breaking…then learn what’s really vital.” (Eric)
• On Fear: “Tattoo it on your eyelids: feel the fear and do it anyway…If you care enough about what you’re doing, you just push through.” (Eric, [06:13])

---

3. The Power of Extreme Focus and Bottleneck-Driven Work

Timestamps: [09:00], [09:59], [11:52]

• Bottleneck Obsession: “It is very, very rare to find a leader who’s actually identifying and attacking the bottleneck of their business at all times…so effectively that it’s never a bottleneck again.” (Eric, [09:00])
• Model 3 ‘Production Hell’: Musk lived in the factory, running to problems as they occurred. “Wherever there’s parts piling up…he would run there…and solve the bottleneck and simplify and delete…” (Eric, [09:59])
• Delegation by Focus: “It’s like passive delegation by focusing on the only thing that matters or the most important thing at that given time.” (Eric, [11:52])

---

4. Developing a Hardcore Work Ethic & Culture

Timestamps: [19:37], [20:15], [24:39], [25:52], [26:42]

• Hardcore Purpose: “You need to have some kind of rage demon in your skull that drives you, or ‘I am wired for war’.” (Codie quoting Elon, [19:48])
• Surges and Standards: “He just showed up at the site and was like, ‘we’re going to have a dome done by dawn. Cancel everything. You’re not going fucking home. Stay here.’” (Eric, [20:15])
• Work/Life Balance: “I don’t think it exists for him. I think he’s just all in all the time…the missions are so big and so all consuming.” (Eric, [24:39])
• Becoming Hardcore: “Pick something that is truly the most important thing to you…put enough skin in the game that the stakes of failure are so overwhelming that you just push through no matter what.” (Eric, [26:42])

---

5. How to Become a Billionaire the ‘Elon Way’

Timestamps: [01:03], [32:06], [33:28]

• The Formula: “Intense focus over a long period of time on something that nobody else can do…work on it intensely over decades.” (Eric, [32:06])
• Serving Humanity: “Pick a problem that adds a new capability to humanity, a benevolent solution that few to no other people are working on…” (Eric)
• Trillions to Billions: “You have to provide trillions of dollars’ worth of value in order to get a billion dollars of value to yourself…the equation just mandates at least a 100 to 1 ratio.” (Host, [33:28])

---

6. The Idiot Index – Ruthless Cost Engineering

Timestamps: [13:17], [37:23]

• Definition: The Idiot index is “the difference between the cost of the raw materials and the final cost of the product.” (Eric, [37:23])
• Example: Aerospace parts with raw materials worth $200 but a $13,000 part. “That part is worth…$200. I would accept maybe $600…but not $13k.” (Eric)
• Application: “Ranking your expenses by the idiot index is useful—how much margin are you paying because you don’t understand the fundamental cost?” (Eric)

---

7. Speed as Superpower – Collapsing Communication & Moving Fast

Timestamps: [42:25], [44:46], [46:31]

• Organizational Speed: “Collapse the gaps to communication. Every org has this…just move the office. Literally: you sit next to each other now.” (Eric, [42:25])
• Returns to Speed: “A factory moving twice the speed…is equivalent to two factories. Speed is its own leverage.”
• Rejecting the Trilemma: “You can have it fast, cheap, or good—reject that. Speed lowers cost.” (Eric, [46:41])

---

8. The Five-Step Engineering Algorithm

Timestamps: [61:32]

• Algorithm Steps:
  1. Question every requirement
  2. Delete or eliminate steps
  3. Simplify or optimize
  4. Accelerate cycle time
  5. Automate
• Order Matters: “He has moved backwards on all five steps multiple times…Every hour and every dollar attempting to solve that problem was wasted because it was just a mirage.” (Eric, [61:36])
• Examples: Tesla onboarding slashed from a month to a sentence: “Be so good the customer talks about you at dinner.” (Eric, [67:13])

---

9. Selling, Storytelling, and Creativity

Timestamps: [54:00], [55:53], [56:43]

• Showmanship = Sales: “Demos like ‘show, don’t tell’. Loaded up the rocket and drove it through DC on a truck bed…Built a demo in 30 hours for Daimler instead of a slideshow.” (Eric, [54:00])
• Embracing Failure in Public: “You can demo the thing and even if it doesn’t work, people reward the risk…The Cybertruck glass broke, he laughed, and it became an even bigger story.” (Host/Eric, [55:53])
• Creativity: Musk is under-appreciated for creativity, not just brute force. “Who else is talking seriously about building mass drivers on the moon?” (Eric, [56:43])

---

10. Leadership, Empathy for Mission, and Decision-Making

Timestamps: [48:24], [50:50], [52:07]

• Empathy at Scale: “Have empathy at the level of the mission, not at the level of the individual…the team deserves the best person in each seat because the mission is just so important.” (Eric, [48:24])
• Hard Decisions: “If you know intellectually what the right thing to do is, if nobody’s emotions existed…is the right decision clear?” (Eric, [50:50])
• CEO Decisions: “By the time a decision has come to me, it’s only two bad choices left…if it was easy, someone else would do it.” (Host/Neil Monahan (YouTube CEO)), [51:38])

---

11. Happiness, Motivation, and Internal Reality

Timestamps: [71:50], [52:28]

• On Happiness: “I don’t think he cares. I think he’s proud of his accomplishments…He judges himself by his contributions.” (Eric, [71:53])
• Inside Elon’s Head: “He’s described his mind as like a non-stop explosion…If you think you want to aspire to be me or do what I’ve done, I don’t think you do. Most of my life has been very hard and painful.” (Eric, [52:28])

---

12. Final Takeaways

Timestamps: [73:06]

• Universal Lessons: “Every living human being can get something useful out of this book…His worldview and how passionate he is about it is really interesting and powerful.” (Eric, [73:06])

---

Notable Quotes

• “Tattoo it on your eyelids: feel the fear and do it anyway…If you care enough about what you’re doing, you just push through.” (Eric, [06:13])
• “If you want to follow the Elon path, pick a problem that adds a new capability to humanity…work on it intensely over a matter of decades.” (Eric, [01:03], [32:06])
• “If you need encouragement, don’t start a company.” (Elon Musk, quoted by Eric and Codie)
• “Passive delegation by focusing on the only thing that matters, or the most important thing at that given time.” (Eric, [11:52])
• “The value of a minute of good thinking from Elon is like a million dollars a minute or more.” (Eric, [70:49])
• “He’s 10,000 times more effective [than average], and it’s because of the software. I think it’s the method and the mindset.” (Eric, [71:50])
• “Reject the trilemma [of] fast, cheap, or good—speed lowers cost.” (Eric, [46:41])

---

Memorable Anecdotes

• 2008 Cliff Story: Musk’s refusal to let Tesla or SpaceX die when he could have saved one or the other ([02:15]).
• Dome by Dawn: Directing teams to work overnight to solve an unsolved engineering problem for Starship ([20:15]).
• Tesla Onboarding Cut to One Sentence: “Be so good the customer talks about you at dinner.” ([67:13])
• Cybertruck Demo Fail: Shattered glass becomes a viral moment and boosts publicity ([55:59]).
• The Idiot Index: Musk hammering down costs by comparing raw materials vs. finished product prices ([37:23]).

---

Additional Insights

• Why He’s Polarizing: Jorgensen discusses Musk’s transition from “nerd hero” to cultural lightning rod, especially after entering political arenas ([07:31]).
• Leaving Without Burning Bridges: The PayPal Mafia story demonstrates why relationships long outlast companies ([33:59]).
• Work Culture & Turnover: Musk’s companies resemble “tours of duty” where fast growth requires constant reinvention—churn isn’t always bad, it’s an adaptation ([59:53]).
• Elon’s Email Culture: Communication style is militant, clear, unambiguous—“If an email is sent from me…explain, clarify, or execute; else, resign.” ([63:27])

---

For Listeners

• If you want to build at the highest level, obsess over mission and bottleneck, not comfort or convention.
• Use the “algorithm”: question requirements, delete, simplify, accelerate, automate—in that order.
• Move faster, test reality, and never let incrementalism or best practices become your default.
• Relationships and reputation compound; don’t burn bridges.
• The road is hard, but the only way to do it is through.

---

This summary captures the key ideas and stories from the episode so you can apply Musk-level tactics to your own ambitions, in business or beyond.

Transcript

[Host]

So good, so good, so good.

[Eric Jorgensen]

New markdowns up to 70% off are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Stock up and save big on shoes, tops, dresses, accessories and more must haves for summer. Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Elon is risk seeking, so mission driven that whether it's a tenth of a percent chance or a 1% chance that SpaceX was going to succeed, he didn't care. He's like, I'm just going to do it. He's like, this mission matters and even if I fail, I will have been proud to contribute to the progress of this ecosystem towards this vision that is so important for humanity.

[Host]

Today's guest, Eric Jorgensen wrote a book called the Book of Elon. This conversation today covers why Elon Musk doesn't just accept fears, he moves through them. Why he doesn't just build systems, but he deletes things entirely to find the one thing that matters. We're going to steal his homework today. What does it take to become a billionaire and an icon?

[Eric Jorgensen]

I think if you want to follow the Elon path, like take a problem that adds a new capability to humanity that few to know other people are working on, and work on it intensely over a matter of decades, that's what he did.

[Host]

Can you talk to me about the Idiot index from Elon Musk, what it is and how it makes him more money?

[Eric Jorgensen]

If you're a young engineer who goes in to have a meeting with Elon Musk, he will ask you like,

[Host]

so your latest book, Book of Elon, all about Elon Musk and what you can learn from him. Naval Ravikant, I think famously said it's the only book an entrepreneur ever needs to read. So I think the big obvious first question is what is the biggest lesson you've learned from Elon Musk that if somebody is young and hungry, they should take away today?

[Eric Jorgensen]

I mean, I think he is absolutely the model for doing big things that have been considered impossible. He just totally changed what we think of as reasonable or impactful in entrepreneurship and company building. So not just the playbook has changed, but like the targets that people can shoot at has changed. And I think that is such an interesting and important shift that we're going through that I hope the whole next generation picks up.

[Host]

Yeah. Is there like one story from Elon that really makes you think about how unreasonable he is?

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yes. I love This, I think this is like the canonical story that characterizes Elon Musk so late 2008. And I know you know this story, but for anybody who doesn't like both SpaceX and Tesla, he was six, seven years in, he'd put his entire net worth, except he was down his last like $30 million. If you can imagine being in such a desperate position. And he'd been just stepped in to run Tesla after being chairman and main funder because the company was not working. He's like, if I'm going to make this work, I have to take it over, I have to jump in. And he's already running SpaceX and now he's doing them both in parallel. They're both in dire straits. SpaceX just had its third fail. It was out of money, they were down to spare parts and Tesla was about to go bankrupt. He said they would have gone bankrupt if they just paid their suppliers on time. Like they were no cash in the bank. The car that they were selling was negative gross margin. There was no DOE loan yet, there was no Daimler deal yet. It was almost all Elon's money. And his friends were begging him to pick one or the other. Because if you put 30 million into either SpaceX or Tesla, it would have been a safe bet and the other one would have died, but one for sure would have lived. And Elon, being this like supernaturally unreasonable person, took the narrow, risky path. He split his money because he couldn't bear to let either one die. He describes it as like holding a kid in each hand off a cliff and he's like, rather than let go of one, I'm going to take the highest risk path, even if it's embarrassing, even if it's financially ruinous. I want to give both of these missions a chance to succeed. And I can't name any other entrepreneurs that at nine figures of net worth and being as renowned and publicly sort of evaluated as he was, would take that risk of going back to zero just to fulfill the mission. And that, I think sort of shows his purpose driven nature, that he was so driven by these missions that the risk of losing the money didn't matter, the risk of his reputation didn't matter. He asked the universe for something in a way that the universe understands. Like that is a test that most of us will never have to take. And he passed it. And I think that story is part of why he has such incredible devotion. And people believe that he's so dedicated to these missions and they flock to his companies and they Flock to invest in his companies because he's demonstrated that character so, so clearly on such a grand scale at such high stakes.

[Host]

What do you think Elon Musk would say about mistakes?

[Eric Jorgensen]

They're an absolutely vital part of long term success. If you stack up a few of the kind of aphorisms that you hear him say, a lot of times, he's actually encouraging these small failures. He's mandating small failures because that's how you find the limits of what works. You don't know if you have something really an elegant design until you've taken away more things than you need to. You see what breaks and then you add back the essential. Right. He says if you're not adding back 10% of what you removed, you're not removing enough. So you have this clutter, you have mess, you have over engineering, you have redundancy. And it's only when you push something to the point of breaking it that you learn what's really vital. He also says in hiring, he's asking for people like, what problem did you solve and what mistakes did you make along the way to solving it? What walls did you have to bounce off? He wants to work with people who understand how to make a mistake and iterate because reality is the ultimate teacher. And so the organizations are designed to iterate quickly, move fast, fail almost intentionally, and then learn from that failure as quickly as humanly possible.

[Host]

Yeah, I do love the visual that he has of his very first.

[Eric Jorgensen]

I think it's like the Falcon, the Raptor engine.

[Host]

The Raptor engine, then to where it is today. We can show it on the screen here and how all of that complexity boils down to beautiful simplicity at the end. Does he ever talk about being scared and fear? Like, does Elon Musk get scared or what would he tell you if you were fearful of taking a big jump?

[Eric Jorgensen]

I think that's such a funny question. He got interviewed and somebody asked him, like, aren't you scared? And he's like, yeah, like, I'm not crazy. Like, these are insane risks that I'm taking. And he's very rational about the fact that they are insane risks. But he has this again, I think this is a great quote which, like, tattoo it on your eyelids, feel the fear and do it anyway. Also, if you look, the nature of fear is if you look at it directly, it disappears. So it's a very. The fear is an illusion. If you care enough about what you're doing, you just push through. And I think that's a really useful heuristic like, if you can imagine quitting what you're doing, don't start. If the fear is stronger than the desire to achieve the mission, then maybe you haven't picked the right mission. Maybe there's something bigger and more purposeful that you would absolutely run through. Fear. And the fear is minuscule compared to the promise of the reward. And it's just so much easier to overcome that fear.

[Host]

Yeah, it's sort of interesting because these days it feels like Elon is polarizing. Like, I see it in, in our content when we talk about it online. If you're on X, it's pretty positive, but if you're on lots of other platforms, you know, I would say there's probably more hate than less hate about Elon. Why do you think he's so polarizing and so many people despise him despite his accomplishments?

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah, there's a. There's probably as many reasons to that as there are people. Like, there's. There's people that disliked him because he was a billionaire before you got involved in politics. I think there's people. I think it's very funny that where he is now, how he ended up so polarizing because he was just like a nerd for a really long time and only nerds knew about him. And all the nerds loved it because he just took these massive risks. And since he got involved in politics, I think it's very hard to be involved in politics at all without making enemies. Like, it's just such a zero sum thing that there's people just really eager to distort and take down reputations and there's people that take sort of anything that's in a headline as gospel and just like assume these tribal beliefs.

[Host]

What do you think it is about? You know, he is able to accomplish these massive things. And you know, the part, the reason, I think even if you hated the guy, the reason that I think you have to not be a moral absolutist and go deep into it, is because he is superhuman. And what he is able to accomplish, you know, not only the size of the missions, but, you know, the scope of his responsibilities at his companies. How he tries to take on everything from, you know, the last frontier to the political frontier. I mean, it's really. We haven't seen anybody like him before in our age. And so I think if you don't like him, you know, Elon talks about the idiot test, but I think the other idiot test is if you don't like Elon Musk, you're the idiot. Because there's something to learn from him, no matter what. But. But my question, I guess, is, how does he work? That is totally different from the average person.

[Eric Jorgensen]

The intensity and the focus on the bottleneck. So the summary of this, I think he's working on the right thing at the right time, which is right now. And he's making a huge improvement to it, not an incremental improvement. And those habits don't just add, they multiply with each other. And so we know that if you're an investor, there's some investment you could make right now that would make you $10 million this year, $100 million. There's some stock is going to go 100x this year. If you know exactly where to put your money at exactly the right time and you stack that up, you'd be a billionaire in years. So that is the power of perfect information. And that's obvious in an investing context, but it's not obvious in an operating context. And so when you're looking at operating a company, it is very, very rare to find a leader who's actually identifying and attacking the bottleneck of their business at all times, working intensely on doing it, doing it immediately, and doing it so effectively that it's never a bottleneck again.

[Host]

What story do you think most exemplifies that about Elon Musk doing the right

[Eric Jorgensen]

thing at the right time all the time? These heuristics that he has about like, well, probably Model 3 production hell is like the story that best exemplifies that. He knew that if you got to, I think the number was like 10,000 cars a week, that the company would live and if it didn't, it would die. And so he moved into the factory and the production line would have, you know, red or green lights, and he would walk to the red. So anytime there's a bottleneck, you're just running up and down miles of factory. Wherever there's parts piling up or wherever there's a red light, he would run there, he would pull people in, and he would solve that bottleneck and solve the bottleneck and solve the bottleneck and simplify and delete and like applying the algorithm. That's kind of where that whole thing emerged. And it was just very clear that, like, nothing else mattered in Tesla at that time other than getting that production line to 10,000. And so many CEOs that we know, so many operators are like, well, I've got a board meeting to prepare for. I've got a weekly meeting, I've got a status update. I've got to do this, I've got to do that. And they're sort of caught in the minutia and maintenance of the company. They are not like Eye of Sauron. Focus, clear, schedule, wake up and attack whatever the biggest priority is that day, no matter what the schedule said it should do, or no matter what else anybody else is asking you for.

[Host]

It's so true, it's funny. David's laughing because I call it my Eye of Sauron, which is like, I just thought I was a nerd. Like, I'm like the Tolkien nerd. They're all like, what are you talking about? But it's very true. Because when you're running something and you know that the company needs X, but your calendar says Y, you have to do the really scary thing, which is, I'm sorry for everybody who's planned anything for the day, it's gone. You know, we're not doing it. And I think that relentless focus on the thing that matters instead of the thing that's right in front of you is really, really hard and rare. And maybe it's not as hard as we think it is. It's just you have to be willing to kill social niceties to focus on what matters.

[Eric Jorgensen]

It's a very interesting, like, inversion of delegation. It's like passive delegation by focusing on the only thing that matters or the most important thing at that given time. And it's just like, look, I've got faith that the rest of my team is going to figure it out. You don't actually need me right now. You just think you need me or you want approval or you like to gain confidence, you want to double check something. But, like, you'll figure it out. And I'm going to go work on this other thing that is the single highest priority at the moment. And Elon Musk, I don't know if this is still true, but at some point he fired his schedule or not because, you know, they weren't great, but because he's like, I want control over my time to pick the priority at all times. And that is a really hard thing to do. When you got all this inbound and all this expectation and a full calendar, but two weeks ago, you does not know what today where the priority is. In the business today.

[Host]

When you were like prepping for this book, was there anything that you found that shocked you that you didn't know about Elon Musk? You're like, whoa, I can't believe that he did that, this or he does that.

[Eric Jorgensen]

I couldn't believe how much risk he took. Like, I knew that he was, I knew that he was entrepreneurial, I knew that he was an innovator, but I didn't like that story about 2008. I did not know that he put his entire net worth on the chopping block over and over and over again. That's the biggest and most canonical story. But it's not the only story of massive risk taking. It's not the only story. The money is an almost irrelevant tool to him. He is just so product and mission driven that he makes financially insane decisions all the time. And I think that's a model that people get wrong about. So many successful business people and billionaires is that the money is an outcome of their passion for the mission and their dedication to the product. They're not pursuing money directly. Most of the wealthiest people I know, that is sort of how they work and it's an indirect pursuit.

[Host]

In all your study of billionaires, do you think you have to take an unreasonable amount of risk to get rich?

[Eric Jorgensen]

I don't think you have to.

[Host]

Leo, who has it, who has gotten really rich but hasn't taken a lot of risk?

[Eric Jorgensen]

Buffett's probably the best example. Like he's a risk manager in a really, really thoughtful way. Some people risk other people's money. So like you could say the, you know, the hedge fund people, the investors like, even if half their net worth is in their fund at any given time. Like Elon is risk seeking, like almost to a fault, right? Or just risk agnostic. He is so mission driven that whether it's a tenth of a percent chance or a 1% chance or a 10% chance that SpaceX was going to succeed, he didn't care. He's like, I'm just going to do it. It's not an expected value calc calculation for his future net worth. He's like, this mission matters and even if I fail, I will have been proud to contribute to the progress of this ecosystem towards this vision that is so important for humanity.

[Host]

Super interesting, because these days everybody tells you, follow your passion, that's when you'll get rich. Follow your passion, that's when you won't give up. And I think Elon Musk would probably say he's actually not passionate about any. This isn't his hobby or his passion. But what would he say? Like he would just say, I go and find the biggest problem that I think is the hardest to solve, but needs solving more than anything else, and that is what I do, that nobody

[Eric Jorgensen]

else is working on yeah. He says, I take the set of steps most likely to make the future good, almost with no consideration for his comfort or lifestyle or reputation or whatever. But that's why these companies were nowhere on anybody's radar. Right. When he started These in early 2002, everybody thought electric cars were insane. There was no space startup economy like those. They weren't even. Mike Moritz had just made money with Elon musk through the PayPal sale. And the greatest, you know, one of the greatest living venture capitalists, like a guy he just made money with at Elon's pitching him Tesla, which is one of the greatest companies of our generation. And Mike's like, no, you're crazy. Will never work. No car to startup has worked in a hundred years. And an electric car startup like get out of here. This is impossible. And he says, like, I underestimated Elon's will. And I think that will comes from this absolute conviction that this product needs to exist, that it is the stronger form of the technology, that this is the mature state of an auto economy is both electric and autonomous. It is just a fundamentally better thing. And we just crossed this line that there was a difference in enabling technologies, which is the lithium ion battery, that suddenly a switch flipped and this product was now possible. But it is a very like, as you look at the other biggest companies on earth, like social networks would have happened without Zuckerberg. Search engines would have happened without Larry and Sergey. Pick your thing. We would have had operating systems without Bill Gates. We would have computers without jobs. It's not clear that we would have had electric cars, certainly at the quality or scale that we would have had without Elon Musk. The industry was not moving in that direction with any sort of speed or grace. It is certainly not clear that we would have had reusable rockets. The trend in space was like NASA was declining. There was no private sector innovation in this. We just had Boeing and Lockheed who are sort of slowly bilking the taxpayers and declining capabilities over time. And so to do both of these generation defining singular companies that were on nobody's radar, that are now, I think on the way to being the biggest companies on earth. Pretty singular achievement that is an outlier among outliers, that is like this sounds grandiose and lionizing, but I really think Elon Musk is going to be the guy of our century in the same way that Napoleon was the guy of his.

[Host]

Ben Franklin. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I was sitting randomly with actually the CEO of Lockheed, Lockheed, and it was interesting Because I asked him, I was like, well, what about all these new competitors that you have? You have SpaceX as a competitor in many ways. And he was like, well, they're not really a competitor. And I just thought, that's fascinating. You really don't think of them as a competitor because, of course, you make all these different things, like actual, you know, weapons and, you know, all sorts of systems. But I think he is even still somehow underestimated in the markets that he plays, which is wild, because this week I also saw the first SpaceX launch I've ever seen. Have you ever seen the rocket in the sky?

[Eric Jorgensen]

Not a person, no.

[Host]

It was wild. I didn't go to the launch site. I was just in Ojai, and that's by where they launch in California. And it looks like a shooting star, but then it gets like wider and wider and wider in the sky, so it looks like it's kind of coming back down. But I guess that's just what it looks like when you're breaking through the atmosphere. And it was so incredible. And I remember I turned to somebody that I was sitting there with, I was like, oh, that's incredible. Look at that. And he's like, we see him all the time. They're here. And so just the normalization of what he's done and also the fact that he's still, like, sort of disregarded is incredible. Like, if you think you're not going to have haters and if you think people are going to applaud you at some point, I think he's a great person to look at, to realize probably never, and that's okay. And you just keep going. Anyway.

[Eric Jorgensen]

The doubters point is a really good one. Like, how many conversations have we had where you're looking back over the last 25, 30 years of what he's done? You're like, oh, my God, he's a genius. He's. He's unparalleled. And then there's like this dysmorphia of the present where, like, now we're going to talk about orbital data centers and a mass driver on the moon. And people are like, but that's crazy. That'll never happen. And it's like, this guy is more leveraged, more talented, more well honed, more well resourced than ever before. And now you're gonna doubt, like, you know, these, these kind of next claims he's not always right, but, like, he's more right than wrong. And the timelines are sometimes a little off, but, like, it's a Pretty good, Trier?

[Host]

Very. I mean, I think what's interesting is he's. I think he describes himself, himself as hardcore. Right. And you talk about this in the

[Eric Jorgensen]

book, and I almost called this book Hardcore Purpose.

[Host]

Oh, that's a good name.

[Eric Jorgensen]

I thought it was a good title. Not. I think I'm comfortable with the title, but, like, those two terms together, this elegant, you know.

[Host]

But I think, you know, some of the quotes that he has, I just love. Like, the amount I torture myself is next level. You need to have some kind of rage demon in your skull that drives you, or I am wired for war. I mean, they just make you want to just pound your chest and type your spreadsheet, you know, as I do. But, like, what do you think are the craziest stories of Elon going into hardcore mode?

[Eric Jorgensen]

These insane surges that he does, sometimes warranted, sometimes unwarranted. But there's many, many stories, and a lot of them are small, but it sets the culture. There's one about the building a dome for starship. They'd spent months trying to weld a dome for starship that fit over this stainless steel cone that was going to go over the top of the rocket. And they hadn't gotten it done for months. And he just showed up at the site and was like, we're going to have a dome done by Dodd. Cancel everything. You're not going fucking home. Stay here. And they're like, well, we don't have this. This thing that we need. He's like, improvise. Grab that thing over there, measure it out, approximate it like. And they failed. But they had a dome done by 9:00am instead of dawn. And so, you know, 12 hours later, they solved this thing that had been unsolved for months. And whether that was the bottleneck at any given time, probably not. But those stories add up and they propagate through the culture. You know, he famously stacked starship, like, months before it was even close to launch. And it wasn't because it needed to be done. It wasn't because it was a bottleneck. Because now people started sharing photos of this absolutely behemoth rocket. And it started to feel more real and become this thing. And so it seemed right. But there's also many, many stories that are more tactical of, like, the bottleneck for the Model X at one point was like the attachment point for the bench in the second row. Tiny thing. But he's like, all right, we're now meeting on this issue weekly. I want all the people in the room. I want to report on like what you did, what you didn't view, we're just going hardcore on this and that has to get resolved. And the way it got resolved was actually, I think like three or four weeks in, Elon came prepped and was like, this engineer was like, this thing isn't, isn't possible to do like metallurgically. The metal can't handle the stress. And he's like, what's. Do you know the formula for like the stress that it's under? And the engineer's like, not off the

[Host]

top of my head.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Elon's like, I know it off the

[Host]

top of my head.

[Eric Jorgensen]

And so he went to the whiteboard and they put it on the whiteboard and they did the math and the engineer was like, oh, I guess that solution does work. And it's like when you know that the CEO of the company is going to like on week three or four, come in with a solution to your problem because he's willing to get that far into the details. I think that is another thing that permeates through the culture over and over again. You asked about the most hardcore. The status updates escalate with how serious the bottleneck is. So weekly cadence for, you know, maybe a normal bottleneck, it'll go to daily, like a daily 24 hour sync on whatever the bottleneck is to run the algorithm on it for one week. One guy, I don't know the details of this, he kind of redacted it. He had to send him an hourly update at all hours. So this guy would like sleep for 45 minutes, wake up, collect the data, and send Elon an email every hour on the hour, 24 hours a day for seven days. And I think that was like, I don't know, maybe too far, but like, how far are you willing to push it to like status updates directly to CEO wherever there's a bottleneck. Ratchet up the heat. Ratchet up the heat. And the meeting schedule changes depending on where the bottleneck is in the company or companies.

[Host]

So fascinating. Yeah, I think in this day and age, like there's so much talk about like hustle porn and working too hard and work life balance. And it's fascinating to me that the other end of the spectrum exists too. Like, I'm friends with a bunch of guys that were on his Doge team and you know, I remember getting exciting, excited because they were getting shipped eight sleep mattresses to sleep on the ground in D.C. during this. And these were guys who had made millions of dollars in like private equity or tech they didn't have to do this, they didn't have to work like that. But they just found the mission so intriguing that they were willing to do it. And like, what I hope this book does is inspires people to do incredible things. Not because your boss is making you and not because it's part of your goal in your 9 to 5, but because how fucking tragic if all you do in your life and wait for a paycheck for something you're not even obsessed with. What a fucking tragedy. And sort of like be around. Greatness as measured by somebody who tries to stretch human capacity to his absolute limit, I find fascinating and I think it should be studied because you don't have to do it forever. You can quote, unquote, go out and enjoy life. But also life is to be found in the enjoyment of building too. Like what would Elon say about work, life balance?

[Eric Jorgensen]

I don't think it exists for him. I think he's just all in all the time. It's not that other parts of his life don't exist. It's just like the missions are so big and so all consuming and that is. I don't put this forth to say everybody has to go be like Elon Musk. I put this forth to say like, if what you think is a ten is probably a four and a hundred is possible and this is what it looks like so like you're capable of a lot more than you think. It's also to say like there's elements in here that are helpful no matter what you're trying to do and no matter what your situation is. I don't care if you're wrong. Running a plumbing company, the algorithm is helpful. Like this ability to focus on the bottleneck is really helpful. This ability to question requirements is really, really helpful. There's so many interesting things in this and Elon is being authentically him. He's authentically like he says, wired for war has a rage demon in his skull. Like he grew up in a violent place, he had an abusive family, he's on the spectrum. He have many, many, many things that are different from like the way you and I came up or go about life or the trade offs that we want to make in life. Fantastic. No problem. Doesn't mean you can't pick and choose some nuggets from the greatest entrepreneur maybe to ever live and get something useful from them.

[Host]

Can you be taught to become hardcore and work harder?

[Eric Jorgensen]

A thing I discovered about myself is as a non perfectionist is that everyone's a perfectionist. When they say, hey, I have enough skin in the game. And so I think, like, he got more hardcore. He was always hardcore. He got more hardcore through Tesla and Model 3 because that just demanded something of him that he. It was harder for him than anything he'd ever gone through before. The stakes were higher, the pressure was higher, the challenge was bigger. And so I think he says he emboldened over time. He became higher conviction, he pushed his limits. He became even more hard on himself in terms of what he thought was possible. And so I think it's absolutely possible to be more hardcore over time.

[Host]

If you want to stretch your capacity and become harder working more hardcore from what you've learned from Elon, what would be the formula? What would you do?

[Eric Jorgensen]

Pick something that is truly the most important thing to you that you can't imagine quitting, a goal for which you'd run through any obstacle, then put your back to the wall, burn the boats, whatever you think. Put enough skin in the game that. That the stakes of failure are so overwhelming that you just push through no matter what. This is the asking the universe for something in the way that the universe understands you drop yourself in the jungle, you become a very different person in order to find your way out. And some of the stories that I think resonate most are the people who really did that. It's not the right thing for everybody. But if that's the journey that you want to go on. Your husband's a seal, right? Like, imagine who the person is who signs up for that before and after they go through buds or training or deployment or whatever it is. Like, there are situations you can put yourself in that make you more hardcore. Guarantee everybody coming out of that is more hardcore than they were going in. So those environments absolutely exist and get around more hardcore people just change. What is the norm for you?

[Host]

It's so true. And also, I do think the more hard things you do, the more hard things you can do, and the less everything seems hard. It's fascinating because you can tell a lot. We hire a lot of employees. If, let's say we got 100 employees right now, I can almost tell who's going to find things harder by what their history is. So, you know, if they were a Green Beret or a nuclear sub operator or, you know, investment banking or, you know, worked at McKinsey on their acquisitions team, I just know they're going to be able to handle a lot. And if they've really only worked in corporate jobs, or especially if they've only ever freelanced I know. Oh, they're actually not going to be able to handle that much. They don't understand the monotony of continuous work, which is like, you know, I think David Foster Wallace like talks beautifull about how that is sometimes the hardest part of life, you know. And so I think it's reading a book like this can reframe what you think hardcore is. Like, Dave and I were talking and we were laughing. David's my producer and he was like, I told him we're hardcore here. I giggled because I was prepping for this and I was like, hardcore, we should define that. And then I was like, when was the last time anybody here stayed until like 9, 10, 11, 12? And I'm almost embarrassed to say not often, ever. And so like defining what hardcore is for yourself, but seeing like a real, you know, level of hardcore, I think also puts things in perspective when things are really tough. So like this is maybe even a book worth reading when you're struggling, when life's really hard to put in perspective what hard is.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah, and hard is variable. Like we work a normal day and kind of like, like have a normal life. And there's nothing wrong with that. But if you're like, all right, we're going to set a crazy goal. One of his things is like order, magnitude goals. You know, you're not going to hear him ever say, like, I would like you to increase that by 20%, please. He'd be like, drop that. The cost of that should be 1% of what it is. Or I want you to increase EE comm sales by 20x. And look, that just totally breaks your normal set of like, oh, maybe we can optimize this or that or like the normal playbooks. Like you have to, to scratch, rethink, question all the assumptions. And that's like, all right, we're gonna, we're gonna like 12 hours a day war room until this metric, whatever the key thing to drive for the business is, is gone. 10x. Like, get in there, call your families, everybody go call your family and tell them you're not coming home until like we have a plan for X. Like, not every company should operate that way. Not every person will respond to that well. But like, if you want to be hardcore, try some hardcore shit. See how it goes.

[Host]

Yeah, my husband always says, you want to be cool, got to do cool shit. That's all right. What about he. I love this quote that's in your book too. Elon says, if you need encouragement, don't start a company. Why do you Think he believes that. And do you think that that mindset for him, is that how he motivates his employees too? Does he only find people who already want to the thing?

[Eric Jorgensen]

I think he filters, like these cultures filter for people who are missionaries and zealots and like, you know, if you go into Tesla or SpaceX or Xai, you're gonna get your absolute maximum potential squeezed out of you. And there's people that want that and in particular want it in certain chapters of their life. I worked so hard in my 20s and like, I worked so hard on things that ended up not working. I worked so hard on things that were like, kind of the wrong direction. And there's something really awesome about being like, I want, I just want to go to the. I want to go through BUDS training. I want to become a seal. I want to go somewhere that's going to max out my potential. I feel like, in particular for engineers, like these organizations are, that it's just such a. It's such a different environment. And once you get exposed to that level of excellence, like, you can carry that on. If you want to go start a company and you want to operate at the pace and, and cadence and with the sort of tools of thought that have made these companies successful, that SpaceX mafia or the Tesla Mafia are going to be a really incredible set of companies who are going to tackle much bigger problems than we've seen startups tackle in the past.

[Host]

If somebody's listening to this and they're like, one day I want to be a billionaire. If they're young and they're like, I want to be a billionaire one day, I want to be as big as these guys, what would you tell them they have to do? What does it take to become a billionaire and an icon?

[Eric Jorgensen]

Intense focus over a long period of time on something that nobody else can do. I think if you want to follow the Elon path, pick a problem that adds a new capability to humanity, a benevolent solution that few to know other people are working on and work on it intensely over a matter of decades. That's what he did. He was thinking about electric cars and space travel in college. Like the ideas that you have even as a really young person can be the ideas that you take really seriously. All through life. I've been really surprised by how often that's the case. That Seth Rogen wrote Superbad when he was 15 and James Cameron had the idea for Avatar when he was a teenager. The adult just takes the children's ideas seriously and sticks with them. And perpetuates them all the way through. But what's made Elon truly, unbelievably, uniquely successful is focusing on these problems that were obviously solutions that humanity needed, but nobody else was working on, and being so dedicated to them that he funded them himself, he stuck with them, he worked through all of these different challenges, and the world eventually sort of came to realize that the solution existed. And I think it's hard. If you do add a new capability to humanity that is meaningful at scale, that too becomes billionaires.

[Host]

It's true.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah.

[Host]

I mean, you have to provide trillions of dollars worth of value in order to get a billion dollars of value to yourself. Like, the equation just mandates 100 to 1 ratio at least. So it's interesting. What about, you know, one story I loved that was in the book is about why you in some ways never want to burn bridges with your ex employees and why if you're thinking about leaving your job or to go to the next thing, you always want to try to keep people of power in your back pocket. Can you tell that story about pay?

[Eric Jorgensen]

So the brief version. Elon started X.com back in the late 1999 and Peter Thiel had started Confinity. And they ended up sort of competing with each other directly for like, email online payments. And they were just slugging it out, beating the shit out of each other. And eventually they decided they should just merge. And the combined teams then included, like, Luke Nozig and Roloff Botha and Max Levchin and Reid Hoffman and David Sacks and I'm sure many other people. Keith Raboy, like dozens of luminaries of the Valley these days. And eventually Elon was ousted. He went on a honeymoon trip and he was ousted by Peter Thiel and the board. Like the rest of the team was like, this guy's too crazy. Like, he's pushing risky strategies, like, we don't think we should do that. And so they ousted Elon as CEO and then they ended up selling the company. And Elon says, I've worked really hard to make that relationship good. I could have been bitter, I could have been angry. But he immediately turned the other cheek and intentionally rebuilt that relationship. And years later, I think more than a decade later, Founders Fund came in with an investment in SpaceX at a really, really critical time that helped save the company. And one good turn deserves another. SpaceX is one of Founders Fund's biggest positions over multiple funds, and they're going to have an unbelievable windfall with this ipo.

[Host]

Yeah, it's so good And Peter Thiel is in charge of Founders Fund. If people don't know. But I think the part that I think about a lot is I thankfully got lucky. In finance. It's very normal when you leave a company for your employers to fund your next company or ask where you're going next. So I got taught, I didn't know it intuitively not to birth bridges. So I kept a lot of them. Now they've been investors in my stuff. We've stayed friends for a decade plus. But then I see this younger generation. I'm like, man, I wish somebody would have told me if I hadn't learned it this way, that you just want to be really careful the way you exit just about anywhere because that can be. That reputation is important at the top. It's so small. I mean, like you and I probably know every single one of those guys you've mentioned from the PayPal mafia and a couple of them live here in Austin. And if you want something big out of life as a young person, I think there's so much, much bad. There's so many bad tiktoks out there that are like, do you leave them? You don't owe anybody anything. And that's a really bad way to make a lot of money in life. So I love that story.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah, I just trusted like the good karma network of, you know, you just do the right thing and nobody wants to work with anybody who has turned on other people in the past. And it's so easy to play that, like, you know, know the one round game and to think that it doesn't matter. And anybody that you talk to who's been around any game for a long period of time is like those relationships matter so much that, that your reputation is your ultimate currency. And you know, Warren Bu's career is an incredible example of that.

[Host]

Oh yeah, 100%.

[Eric Jorgensen]

It's deals nobody else does.

[Host]

Yeah. And he can, you know, famously do them on the back of a napkin because he likes to keep it so simple and has such a high trust index. I want to talk about a different index, which is, is the Idiot index, which I had never heard about before reading your book. Can you talk to me about the Idiot index from Elon Musk, what it is and how it makes him more money.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yes. So if you're a young engineer who goes in to have a meeting with Elon Musk and you are responsible for one system, he will ask you, like, I want to know every part in the system you're responsible for ordered by the idiot Index. And what he means is the highest idiot index part is going to be the one with the biggest difference between the cost of the raw materials and the final cost of the product. So one famous example, and these were all over Aerospace. But SpaceX, the story of SpaceX is basically the story of taking really, really expensive aerospace parts and finding a super, super, super cheap way to build them. So the half nozzle jacket is like a big piece of steel. And to buy one from an aerospace supplier is like $13,000. And he's like, why is that one piece of steel $13,000? Well, it's aluminum, it's aerospace grade, it's shaped, it's this. And the actual answer is that there's like and a subcontractor and a subcontractor. And everybody's like sort of passing along profits and adding layers of overhead and expense and inefficiency. And he's like, how much is the steel in that part worth? If you just weigh it and look at the spot value of steel, it's $200 worth of steel. And so an engineer who comes in and says like, ah, that part is $13,000. He's like, wrong, that part is worth the price floor of that part is $200. I would accept maybe $600, which would be an idiot index of like 3. I will not accept an idiot index of like a hundred. So this part should not be a hundred times more expensive than the raw materials. And so for reference, like your iPhone, like the, the raw materials of your iPhone is like 30%. Or a car is like 30%. So that's like a good ratio for a complex manufactured product. But aerospace, when he looked into rockets, the rocket as a whole index was like 1000. It was well over 100.1% of the cost is the raw materials. And so he's like, this has to be a horrifically inefficient manufacturing process. It's a tool for understanding how efficiently a part is made and stack. Ranking the things that you're producing by the ADID index is a really effective. This is useful no matter what you do and where you are. So just look at all your expenses and then try to rank them by like, basically how much margin are you paying? How much money is somebody else paying? Because you don't understand the fundamental cost of the thing that you need out of them.

[Host]

Yeah, it's such a good point because it's true. Everybody thinks about it in manufacturing, but it's just as true in services, you know, and that's why I Think he's so good at getting to the truth.

[Eric Jorgensen]

You know, especially in the age of AI. Like, AI totally changes that math around. Like, what's the idiot index of moving pixels around? It's now very close to zero.

[Host]

Yeah. And so how often, I mean, how are you going to stay in competition if you don't understand what the real cost of things are? And so I think half of your job as a CEO is going around and saying, like, how long did it did that take us to do? How expensive was that? And then I love, you know, his lines that you probably know better than I do, but, you know, is it illegal to move faster? Is it against the laws of physics to move faster? Or is this just like a personal preference or a business decision that we're making?

[Eric Jorgensen]

Right, yeah, this is one of his superpowers. Is, is not starting with the current best practice. Like I. This is one of the things I've taken away is like, when I hear, well, best practice is X, I'm like, oh, we're already lost. Like, we're starting from a bad place because. Because only incremental improvements are going to come from like, well, how do we do it today? Where he starts with is like, what is the theoretically maximum, most efficient, most effective, like, perfect thing? Now show me your excuses for not getting closer to that. And that's how you, like, actually evaluate critically those obstacles between you and the theoretically perfect and move through them.

[Host]

If you're finding this as useful as I am, please do me a huge favor. Subscribe to the channel. This is how we continue to get bigger and bigger guests on maybe even Elon Musk one day. If you do the subscribe button right now and tell me in the comments if you did it, I want to say hi to every single one of you. That's a new subscriber here. I mean, and you can even take this outside of business context. Like, I think about what does this bench cost, you know, and how much of the things are we marked up on life that we're spending more money on and thus more life on that we shouldn't be? Because actually we could probably get it for 1/5 the cost from another marketplace if we just change the logo on top of it.

[Eric Jorgensen]

How about weddings? Like, like the cost, the inflation adjusted cost of average cost of a wedding over the last like 50 years. What do you actually need is like a ring and a bouquet and a minister. Like, do it in your backyard like your grandparents.

[Host]

I got married in parking lot, I'll have you know.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Really?

[Host]

Yeah. I'M not a fancy broad. Yeah. Parking lot of a dmv. Because we keep it classy around here.

[Eric Jorgensen]

That is a first principles.

[Host]

Well, I am a little. I mean, I'm so glad you wrote the book because I learned so much from listening to him because he's like 10x order of magnitude more intelligent and effective than I am. And so if I could just steal 1x that effectiveness, I'm going to be an outlier in my industry, which is how I'm thinking about this whole conversation. Like how do we just take 1x of his efficacy and apply it to our lives? And if we could do that, then it could change a lot of things. Elon is so obsessed with speed. What are his rules for moving faster and getting more speed in business?

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah, the speed of all of these companies is an absolutely fundamental trait. So. So what's interesting there is he designs his organizations to minimize the overhead of communication. So he puts people who need to share information next to each other. He puts engineers and designers like on the line next to people who are manufacturing things. So my phrase for this is collapse the gaps to communication. Just get rid of anything that is between people who need to be interfacing. Every organization has this right. There's natural tensions between sales and product or service and engineering or whatever it is and, and just move the off. Literally. You sit next to you now and you listen to each other all day. And I just need higher bandwidth communication between you two. An interesting thing is that sort of communication delays stack. So if it takes you one hour to reply to an email as like you know the first rung, you've actually pushed out the final communication by like maybe 24 hours. And so, so learning to drop shortcuts like shoots and ladders information around organizations directly to people who need it is incredibly important. Weekly reviews, just the cadence of the things that get checked and how often they get checked, the returns to speed. He's got this great line. Simplicity delivers both reliability and low cost. And things can be so much faster when they are simpler. Like when you're just eliminating steps. It's one of the very counterintuitive things to like you subtract something and everything gets better. It doesn't cost something. But eliminating the cost makes improvements itself. It's alchemy. It's absolutely one of the core things here. And I think that creates speed and then the speed then leads to increased efficiency on your. Like you turn over cash way more often. And Elon says like a factory moving twice the speed. Speed is equivalent to two factories. And so you've doubled the value of your working capital. The relentless focus on speed from him as an operator, on decision making, on the pace of manufacturing, on. It is absolutely. Throughout all of these organizations, the learning rate is just the ultimate thing that you join the engineer.

[Host]

What about for all the people who. And I hear this all the time. Like, people say, well, but if you move fast, then you're breaking stuff. If you move fast, quality drops. If you move fast, you know, you make bad decisions. There seems to be this immediate reaction by us as humans that to go fast is to do things sloppily. If you can move faster, you just have the ability to make more mistakes. But it's okay because you find out the truth faster, and thus because cash is moving more quickly. You. You just have more long. You have a longer Runway to fix the mistakes.

[Eric Jorgensen]

I think this is true in Higher it too. He gets his reputation as being hardcore and an asshole in the same way that Steve Jobs did in part for firing people quickly and sometimes summarily or with very little judgment. And what I realized is erring on the side of firing too quickly is actually so rare. And so we have such an emotional reaction of like, oh, that's unfair. But actually, 99.9% of organizations on the planet are erring on the side of firing too slowly, in some cases by a day or a week or years or never. That was a mistake. But we're a culture that prizes speed. We move really quickly, and, like, we are going to make mistakes of speed, and they're better than making mistakes of sloth.

[Host]

The formula to know if you're going too fast and making too many mistakes is like, you should have at least 10% of the things that you regret in some way or 10% of the things that you have to add back later. Elon would say. And so maybe if you're too much over the 10, that could be problematic. But if, like, 80 to 90% of the decisions you were correct on and you only needed to go a little bit slower on 10 to 20, your speed of the 80 is so much bigger than the mistake of the 20 that you're winning. So there's probably some formula there even.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah. And I think that, like, the. The trilemma, right. That, like, you can have it fast, cheap, or good. Choose to, like, rejecting that is a really helpful thing.

[Host]

Yeah. So, like, reject the trilemma entirely.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Reject the trilemma because speed lowers cost. And so if you hold the quality bar and just move faster, you should be Able to lower costs.

[Host]

This is my love language. Is talking about speed of business such a slow rate of cost? Like I don't know if everybody else is hot and bothered right now listening to this.

[Eric Jorgensen]

I hope you are.

[Host]

I know you are. But I do think this just like these moments when you understand this in business and your life, it's hard to ever look at the world the same again.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah. Rejecting the trilemma is a huge like that feels like a paper wall.

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Jorgensen]

And, and then when you, once you have that in your head when you hear people on your team, you're like, hey, I'm asking for this thing. I know it's hard but this is, this would be a big innovation. This would be a breakthrough for our company. This would be a new successful product line. And your leadership team is gonna be like, well you know, we. This that these are the trade offs. This is like, nope, like, or you're getting it from a contractor, somebody that you're hiring, a supplier that you're evaluating. You're like, I'm going to push you. I'm going to hold you on a quality bar and I'm going to push you on speed. And like the cost should be there. Like isn't there a way that moving faster reduces cost? And a lot of times there is. There could be.

[Host]

Yeah. This is really good. There's a lot of tension in the book and in Elon in general, which I love. Like he's obsessed with truth, direct feedback and reality. He also has this take of like maybe some people think he's anti empathetic or his too tough on feedback like in your, in your study. And him what parts are you like we should all emulate this. And what parts are you like? I think even he would have regrets on this. Or are there any. And it's just public, you know, sort of perception of him.

[Eric Jorgensen]

I think the one of the things he, I mean he is unique in the fact that he is on the spectrum. Right. He has Asperger's. He's been public about this. And to some extent he has a little bit of a biological advantage in discounting sort of like the feelings or emotions of others. Others.

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Jorgensen]

And Peter Thiel has an interesting tape that's like we should ask ourselves why all of the great business builders seem to have some sort of this pattern. There's a thing in the valley of being like fashionably autistic. Like it's so weird. Like why does it take that that type of person to like be an innovator? We should be celebrating these people. We should be socially rewarding them. But when they're disrupting something, the status quo, everybody's sort of attached to the status quo in their own ways. And I think what Elon does, which is so he has a knack for it, but anyone can do it in the proper context, is have empathy at the level of the mission, not empathy at the level of the individual. Right. And so that goes back to the like, are you firing too slow, too fast? Do you have the right team? If what you really care about if the most important thing in the world that you bet your life on is making life multi planetary. That is a mission that's very easy to be like. Like, I'm so sorry, you're not cutting it. There's a better person for this seat and the team deserves to have the best person in the seat because this mission is just so important. Like, that is a really holding the empathy at the mission of the individual. Even though you, you, you know, you look like an asshole and you have to have a lot of hard conversations. Like that's what, you know, leadership is in a lot of these cases.

[Host]

Yeah, no, I've certainly felt the same thing. I always do giggle, though. I do think this is like a little victim mindset to say. But I do think, like, women get a rougher edge on this one. Like, they're not. It's not seen as good of a thing when you're non empathetic. Like, Alex Cooper's getting trolled in the news right now for being like, too hardcore of a place. She's like one of the top podcasters in the world. Totally create an ecosystem. I bet she's tough. I bet she's not super nice all the time. Like, why are we shocked by this? So I kind of come back to that with Elon too, which is like, if you want to do really hard, big things, you have to make really hard, big, uncomfortable decisions that most people would probably find. Find just about as comfortable as sandpaper on skin.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yes. A lot of them. Quickly.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Eric Jorgensen]

In back to. Back to back.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Eric Jorgensen]

In spite of the feedback that you're getting that maybe, you know, it's harsh or it's too fast or it's too rough or whatever.

[Host]

Yeah. And so if you get that feedback, like, and you're listening, I guess it's like, just know that that's okay. Like, that is probably what it takes at the highest level of the game.

[Eric Jorgensen]

One of my mentors, it gives me, like, just when you're feeling stuck about a decision as an operator, it's just kind of of like, do you know intellectually what the right thing to do is? If nobody's emotions existed, if none of the feelings were going to be heard, if everybody understood and could perfectly understand your intentions and that you were well intentioned and pure and mission oriented and honest in what you were doing, is the right decision clear? And almost always the answer is yes. I feel tangled in the perception or the feelings of other people. And once you've seen that, then it's just kind of an internal struggle of like, well, I have to, you know, it is my role to do the right thing for this organization or for this mission, regardless of, you know, how it might be perceived or felt by some people. That's hard to do. It's especially hard to do all the time. But how do you think you can get better at it with reps?

[Host]

Yeah, I mean, I was Talking to the CEO of YouTube whose name is Neil Monahan, and he's incredible dude. And it was interesting because he's like. They were asked what's the hardest part about being a leader at your level? And I could only imagine for Elon, but he said the hardest thing is by the time a decision has come to me, me, it's only two bad choices that are left. And so if it's easy choices, if there's any easy choice or good choice, somebody else has already made it. But when you're at the top, the only options are usually bad or not great. Otherwise it would have been handled already. And I thought that was very well said.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah. Elon's version of that is like, everybody thinks they want to be CEO. Like from the outside, like, you see the trappings, but when you're CEO, you get a distillation of the worst problems in the company.

[Host]

What does Elon Musk say about being in his head? I can't remember. Like, he has a couple lines about what it's like to actually be him. And do you really want to aspire to this? Do you remember that story?

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah. He's described his mind as like a non stop explosion or a never ending storm. Like an unhappy storm. The rage demon in the skull. It's very. He says if you think you want to aspire to be me or do the things I've done, like, I don't think you do. Most of my life has been very hard and painful and a lot of that has been then as a result of the decisions he's made. Because he's just chosen these grand quests. I like to think of him a little bit as a sci fi hero. He is a genius, but in many ways he's still boyish. He's described that way in a lot of different ways. Sense of humor and taste, video games and movies and things like that. And it's very. He has this sci fi hero bent about him where he's like, I don't care how long the odds are, I'm just going to. I'm going to keep going on this grand quest and it doesn't matter how big the demons or how challenging the path, I'm just going to keep walking it. And that's partly, I think, how he manages to have the success that he's had is taking these hard, narrow paths.

[Host]

At one point, Elon decides to take on X and buy it too. And he has a couple lines from around that period about. About if you really want to sell something, salesmanship is showmanship. What does he mean by that? Like, why does Elon sell so much? How do we learn how to sell? From Elon Musk?

[Eric Jorgensen]

I think he. His. One of his absolute top moves that is still underrated is demos like show Don't Tell, like loaded up the rocket and drove it through Washington D.C. on a truck bed. He got the Daimler deal in part because was at Tesla. The Tesla executives from Daimler were coming to visit Tesla and he's like, we have a slideshow, we have a presentation that is insufficient evidence. So in like 30 hours, you grabbed engineers and they had a. I think it was like a smart car and they loaded an electric drivetrain into a smart car, which absolutely ripped shit because it was like this tiny little light car. And so it went 0 to 60. And these guys are like experiencing acceleration that they've never felt before. And that demo was in part what drove them. Even the bad demos early in Tesla were like, stuff wasn't right because it was too hot. And gave Larry and Sergey a ride in one of the early Roadster prototypes. And it was a bad demo, but they still invested because they were like, oh, these guys are really building stuff. And over and over again, this kind of show, don't tell, just show physical progress. Build a demo, build a prototype as quickly as you can get on a PowerPoint, get off the whiteboard and like get your hands dirty and have something to show tangible is he does over and over again.

[Host]

Yeah. You know what's interesting too is I think a lot of times, like you get scared to do demos because guess what happens when you do a demo? Something can go wrong. Very little can go wrong in a PowerPoint or in a presentation where you talk. But if you want to make a big, huge change, having a little risk again seems to be the common thread. Like, I loved when he had Joe Rogan shooting the bow at the car, you know, and it, it like broke the window or it dented it or something, you know, and didn't he shoot a gun or something at the car and it broke the car window? It didn't work, but everybody remembered it and bought more cars.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah.

[Host]

So it's. It's almost like you can demo the thing and even if it doesn't work, people reward the risk.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah, yeah. The cyber. The cyber truck reveal, like, threw the ball bearing at the window and it wasn't supposed to break and it did or whatever, but. And he laughed and he laughed and that became like somehow an even bigger story and me than it would have if it had gone right.

[Host]

That's a good, really good lesson. And I think we're even a visual medium where I'm online showing stuff a lot and we still don't do it enough. So often I fall back to the PowerPoint as opposed to showing the thing live. It just takes a little bit more creativity. Actually, I don't think Elon gets enough credit for the creativity angle. He gets a lot of credit for brute force and then big missions. But are there stories where, where you're like, wow, this man is actually incredibly creative as a storyteller or as a builder that you can think of.

[Eric Jorgensen]

And I think the ability to sort of see things that other people aren't and push beyond that boundary is like, he's an example setter in a lot of ways. Who else is talking seriously about building mass drivers on the moon? So on a frontier basis, he's thinking further out. One of the tools that he talks about, about using, people don't realize SpaceX was not originally a company. It was a philanthropic mission. He had almost $200 million from their sale of PayPal. And his first plan was to just shoot a rocket to Mars, have a little greenhouse on the surface of Mars. And he says the reason he did this is because people respond to precedents and superlatives. So when he's launching a product and you hear this in Apple all the time, it's the thinnest, it's the fastest, it's the biggest, it's the first, like, something about us, like, that's a headline. We want it. That we want the best or the thinnest or the fastest or the cheapest. Or whatever. And so he wanted to set this precedent that is like, this is the first life on Mars. He wanted the Sunday morning newspaper shot to be like a green plant on the red planet. And that, that would like, catalyze this movement of an increased budget for NASA and new interest and a new age of space travel. This is another reason why we know that he's truly a missionary on these things. And it turns out that the reason that he couldn't do that, that the rocket technology wasn't there and wasn't cheap enough. And so he's like, oh, the vehicle to get there doesn't exist or is too expensive. Maybe I need to conduct a feasibility study on, like, can I build the vehicle? So pulled all these different rocket engineers and just kind of did a, like, Saturday, every Saturday, like, feasibility analysis. And then right around the time they were kind of like, oh, this is going to. This, this could work. PayPal sold. And he's like, all right, let's. Let's go to it.

[Host]

Do you think that you should do side quests in life to be successful? It seems like Elon has a lot of side quests, from like a flamethrower, you know, to a boring company tongue maul.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah. I want to say yes because I feel like he does so many. And I'm sitting here today because of my side quests. Right. Like, I think it goes against the kind of like, maniacal focus thing. That should seem like one of the big takeaways from Elon Musk. But that's how he has fun. I think a lot. You could call Twitter a side quest. You could call Doge a side quest. You could call boring company Neuralink. These are all he will be known for, Teslas and SpaceX. But so many other things, he just spins up. And this is closer to a Novalism. But I feel like just do the thing that you are most naturally inclined to do. Trust your intuition a little, little bit. And Elon has had, I think people in his life have been like, hey, too many side quests. Like, we gotta get back to the main mission. So let's all hope we've got the people in our lives that can help us get on the right tracks if we happen to lose it.

[Host]

I don't know if you know the answer to this, but given how intense he is, do his companies have crazy turnover? Do people just churn and burn at his companies? And does he care about something like that?

[Eric Jorgensen]

I think it's somewhat of a barbell. So I do imagine there's people who are like, you know, six months in and like are turned over quickly. I also know a lot of people who work there for a two or three year like tour of duty. You know, the rule of thumb in startups is like you, you're a different organization every time. You triple in headcount or roughly an order of magnitude.

[Host]

Right.

[Eric Jorgensen]

And so what he says is like what looks like a three year Churn is actually a full tour of duty. It just at another company would take 10 years to do it and it would look like a normal, healthy career path. And here like we covered that ground in because we're just moving more quickly. But I think the assumption that Churn is always bad is something that he would reject.

[Host]

Yeah, I think so too. I also think, I mean we found in our companies we about triple every year. And that.

[Eric Jorgensen]

That's crazy by the way.

[Host]

Well, we've only been in business for like, you know, four years. But I think that originally used to freak me out and I'd be like, my people who are here from my first day, you know, 90% of them aren't here today. And so, you know, that makes you question yourself as a leader. And at some point one of my better mentors told me that same thing, they're like, well, they either have to become 3x better then inside of a year, which could totally happen. You could grow at the speed of the company or you know, they're going to get outgrown by the company or their role might get downgraded at the company and somebody else might come in over you. And so I do think normalizing that like and having those. I also like how he has all these formulas for everything. So it allows you to contextualize what's normal or not.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah. And there's some people who are happy at a 10 person company and aren't happy at 100 person company, this agency on the employee side too.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Eric Jorgensen]

And people go through life changes, changes and different priorities and all of that is perfectly wonderful.

[Host]

I want to talk about the algorithm. We talk about Elon Musk's algorithm. What it is, what it does.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah. So this is his five step engineering process. I would say it's the gem that came out of the pain of Fremont. So Fremont, the factory was an early Tesla factory. And he's like, we screwed up everything. It was an absolute disaster. And, and it was because he got the algorithm backwards and this is how he learned it. This is catastrophic. Hundreds of millions of dollars, mistake. The algorithm is five steps and the order is very important. So the first step is to question every requirement. He says no matter how many requirements there are, question them. Eliminate as many as you can. Every existing requirement must have an individual human being's name attached to it. The more requirements you can get rid of, the less weird, unnecessary compromises you're going to make, the bigger your design space is for potential solutions. He says requirements from smart people are particularly dangerous because you take them more seriously. The second step is delete. Try very hard to delete the part or the process step. The third is simplify or optimize. The fourth is accelerate cycle time, so move faster. And the fifth is automatic. Automate the fifth and he's like, I have moved backwards on all five steps multiple times. I've tried to automate something and then I've tried to make it go faster and then I've tried to optimize it and then I ended up deleting it because I didn't question the requirements in the first place. And every hour and every dollar on that attempting to solve that problem was wasted because it was just a whole big mirage, basically of a problem. And so applying that algorithm like, over and over and over and over again to everything. And that's how. That's what he actually does when he goes through these weekly technical review meetings is like having engineers walk through the algorithm and try. This is how you work through these roadblocks and arrive at these radical races.

[Host]

You got to figure out how to get into some of these meetings and then write about how he runs meetings because it's the most like, it's going to get no views on the Internet. But I think the way you run meetings and do readouts is really like how fast your blood moves through the veins of a company. And it's such a unique thing that's so hard to do and then extra hard to get your team to do it as well as you. You. Yeah, I mean, it'd be fascinating to see. All of these stories are incredible, but I think the things we often don't get to see are the act like, talk about, show, don't tell, you get told, told, told, told all the time on Elon. But God, if we could get behind the scenes and be like, well, actually, let's talk about one. One here that I thought was amazing is he sends an email and he. So his emails are some of my favorites. But it's like, to everybody, subject, please note, if an email is sent for me with explicit directions, there are only three actions managers email me back to explain why what I Said was incorrect. Sometimes I'm just plain wrong. Exclamation point. Two, request further clarification if what I said was ambiguous. Three, execute the directions. If none of the above are done, the manager will be asked to resign immediately. Thank you, Elon. And like, this email is such a great, exact example of how he communicates. So, like, one, any reaction to that? And two, are there others like that where just his. His. The actual artifact from Elon is worth dissecting?

[Eric Jorgensen]

Yeah, there's a. There's a book that's like. I think it's like a dollar on Kindle that somebody just, like, collected a bunch of his emails. And it's. I went through it and it's. It's funny to read. And a lot of them are like that, where you're like, well, that is unambiguous communication. That is very clear. And of course, 90% of people will read it will be like, what an asshole. And it's like, that guy.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Eric Jorgensen]

If you're emailing a thousand people and you're trying to be like, we are in wartime. Oh, my God, like, you've got to communicate. Don't just. Just ignore my, like, tell me what's going on. Correct me or do it or like, yeah, it. That's a pattern, actually. You see, like, even creative people, I. I want to say it's George Lucas where he's like, he had three stamps on his desk and somebody would, like, send him. It was in, like, the memo days of, like, a sketch, and it was like, yes, no, or speak. Those were like, the only, like, responses that he had. When you're. When you're one of these people who's like, in the nexus of a thing, and you're trying to manage thousands of inbound communications per day, thousands of decisions per day. Like, how else do you do it? But to be like, I got three slots like this, this, or this.

[Host]

You really can. Yeah. And so I think especially. Yeah. As you're building anything, trying to figure out what is your version of the three. Is it stamps like Lucas, you know, is it an email that just says you. You only get to choose three options. And I feel this intimately because the world is getting so much faster. And so if you don't learn how to become faster, you're going to get left behind. I think about it a lot right now with looms. Like, I love multiple looms. Said to me, don't wait for a meeting. Give me the loom. I'll 2 1/2x speed you. I'll respond in Almost real time to it. You can have a feedback, and if you leave more, we just go back and forth almost immediately, because otherwise you have this compounding hour effect. So that's so good.

[Eric Jorgensen]

He really thinks. I mean, it's a very mathematical way of thinking about it. If he thinks about the bandwidth of communication back and forth, he's like, the bit rate of communication in speaking or in reading is faster than speaking. So he's like, I didn't go to lectures in college. I would just read because I could read faster than I can hear. And he's like, I hate email. Text is faster. It could just. The elegance of it, it's just very. Yeah, it's very interesting.

[Host]

Elon Musk has an algorithm that he uses to make more money and make ridiculous things happen. What is the best example of that algorithm at play?

[Eric Jorgensen]

The example that I love, because everybody, every organization has a version of this, is that Tesla had, for a period of time, like, a bottleneck in their service center where they were training new employees and they'd hire somebody to work in the floor where people sell cars, and they would have to go through like a month of training videos and quizzes and FAQs and all of this. And it became like the thing that was holding the company back from sales. And the president, John McNeil, and the story is in his book was like, applied the Algorithm. He's like, what is the theoretical maximum efficiency? It's like they can. Well, they're effective on day one. What does a training program look like that allows an employee to be effective on day one one at a new company? He was like, well, it has to be a really short thing that aligns sort of their effort and their intention, even if they don't have a bunch of information. And so he shortened their employee onboarding to one sentence, which is, be so good that the customer talks about you at dinner. Give them such a great experience that it's remarkable. And they want to go tell their family at dinner. We hired you. We trust you to interpret that correctly. You'll learn everything else you need to as you go. And so, like, a month worth of time and paychecks and effort and backup just deleted. I found that so, like, so obvious. Once you see it deleted. And you're like, we thought it would break a bunch of things. Nothing breaks like, hilarious. Another one is even like, they. They had a bottleneck around the service centers to say, like, we. We don't have enough shops to do all the repairs that customers are asking us to do. We need A hundred more service centers. They're 3 million each. This is a $300 million, like, project that we have to undertake. And they went to Elon with it, and he was like, we don't have 300 million. You have to find a different way to solve this problem, like repair the cars without spending the money to build the service centers. And and so the team goes and applies this algorithm and is like, question the requirements. Like, do we need a service center in order to service the cars? Some of them. Okay, how many of them? All right, we're going to stand at a service center. We're going to triage every car that comes in. Could we do this repair without a lift? Could we do this repair without a huge toolkit? And it turns out that 90% of the repairs could be done by a technician with just like a portable toolkit at the customer's home. And so they inverted their service model and they said, this is better for customers. We're going to come out to you, we're going to repair your car in your driveway. Just send out one technician now. Guess what? We don't have to wait two years to build more service centers. We don't have to spend money, hundreds of millions of dollars to build service centers. We questioned the requirements of what the problem resolved and approached it with as few steps and as little expense as possible, while maintaining the quality of the customer experience and keeping their experience at the center of every decision that we make. And it turns out that the best solution for the customer is actually extremely cheap and extremely fast to implement. And it doesn't matter that the entire rest of the industry is dealerships based around, like, come on in, tour our new cars, bring your car in, we'll keep you here for six hours. Like, Tesla wanted to do the thing that was best and cheapest and fastest and questioned their requirements, and the problem changed entirely.

[Host]

It's actually crazy that the rest of the auto industry still has some tire dealerships with like, whole, you know, parking lots filled with cars. And Tesla has just categorically rejected that and won. And the rest of the industry has seen that and gone. We're going to leave it in a really old, expensive way.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Innovators dilemma is brutal. The value of a minute of good thinking from Elon is like a million dollars a minute or more. Like that is just a wild. He's the most leveraged person alive. And so understanding that some these are the tools that he uses in that minute or in that half hour to break these bottlenecks or unlock a New opportunity. Just feel these are the most battle tested tools for operating the business that there are and the result of decades of extremely hard won, unique lived experience. And so to me that is just such an incredible signal of the value of these things and how much better you can become by applying them. He's un unique and special, but he's not 10,000 times smarter than anybody else who's ever lived. But he's 10,000 times more effective. And it's because of the software. I think it's the method and the mindset. There's a lot of raw talent, but that doesn't explain everything.

[Host]

Do you think he's happy?

[Eric Jorgensen]

I don't think he cares. I think he's proud of his accomplishments. I could be wrong. I don't know him personally, I've not spent time with him. I don't think he prizes his personal happiness. I think he judges himself by his contributions. I think he judges himself harshly, I'm sure, because he continues to drive so hard. But I think he's contributed more than anybody else alive and will go down as one of the greats.

[Host]

Yeah, when everybody always highlights those quotes about him where he talks about the rage demon in his head. I also think that he is a very joyous person because you look at some of his just even the iconic like, you know, photo on the stage, like that is a moment of joy for a human being. And you know, perhaps he is not steady state happy or even content all the time, but I'm not even sure that's the point of life either. It's like in my opinion, to have as much of the varied experience of life as humanly possible than to wash up sort of bruised and battered at the end. Then I think I just want to end with one last question, which is if somebody was going to read this, this book, what is the one thing you want them to take away from your five plus years now study at Elon Musk?

[Eric Jorgensen]

I firmly believe every living human being can get something useful out of this book. No matter where you are, where you live, what mission you're on. I think if you have a really clear direction in life, then the tools for success are going to be in there and you're going to learn from how Elon operates. And I think if you are looking for meaning and something to dedicate your life to, to he has a really powerful way of looking at the world and giving us a sense of what meaningful work is and what kind of missions are worth going on. And I found that that was a surprising piece of it to me. I knew he was effective, but his philosophy, his worldview and how passionate he is about it and how broad the perspective is I think is really interesting and powerful. And I don't write books in order to like there's no shoulds. I just sort of put this forth and I hope you find something to enjoy in it, but everybody's going to take something different away.

[Host]

It's a fantastic book, as are all of your books. Thank you so much for being here today. Eric Jorgensen the Book of Elon out everywhere. Eric Jorgensen on X is probably the main place where people find you. He's also a great follow there. Thank you for being there.

[Eric Jorgensen]

Thank you for having me. The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. @blinds.com We've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50,000 five star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals free samples, zero pressure right now. Get up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus get a free professional measure. @blinds.com rules and restrictions apply.