Embark on an intellectual journey with us as we unravel the enigma of Elon Musk, the mastermind behind some of today's most revolutionary technologies. Our latest episode promises a deep dive into Musk's formative years. We connect the dots between Musk's unique thought processes and his leadership, exploring his early entrepreneurial ventures like Zip2 and X.com, and how they set the stage for his later successes. Insights from Musk's love for biographies of influential figures illuminate how past legends have shaped his modern-day empire-building techniques.
Unpack the idiosyncrasies of Elon Musk's management style with us, as we dissect how his approach to business is anything but conventional. From SpaceX's early failures to Tesla's industry disruption, we examine Musk's preference for action over excessive planning and his willingness to risk it all. His problem-solving algorithm—questioning every requirement and streamlining processes—is a testament to his distinctive approach to innovation. Furthermore, we share stories of Musk's hands-on participation in all aspects of his companies, including the co-founding of SolarCity, showcasing his unwavering commitment to challenging the status quo across diverse sectors.
Witness the transformative power of Elon Musk's leadership as we discuss the cultural overhaul he's instigating at Twitter. Through a rigorous evaluation of employee loyalty and competence, Musk is forging a more resilient and focused team, reflective of the 'hardcore' working environment he champions. This episode not only charts Musk's relentless pursuit of excellence but also delves into the principles that underpin his decision-making process. Join us as we contemplate the influences of Musk's passion for learning and how the biographies he reads continue to refine his vision and strategies, providing a playbook for success in the unpredictable world of tech and innovation.
Embark on an intellectual journey with us as we unravel the enigma of Elon Musk, the mastermind behind some of today's most revolutionary technologies. Our latest episode promises a deep dive into Musk's formative years. We connect the dots between Musk's unique thought processes and his leadership, exploring his early entrepreneurial ventures like Zip2 and X.com, and how they set the stage for his later successes. Insights from Musk's love for biographies of influential figures illuminate how past legends have shaped his modern-day empire-building techniques.
Unpack the idiosyncrasies of Elon Musk's management style with us, as we dissect how his approach to business is anything but conventional. From SpaceX's early failures to Tesla's industry disruption, we examine Musk's preference for action over excessive planning and his willingness to risk it all. His problem-solving algorithm—questioning every requirement and streamlining processes—is a testament to his distinctive approach to innovation. Furthermore, we share stories of Musk's hands-on participation in all aspects of his companies, including the co-founding of SolarCity, showcasing his unwavering commitment to challenging the status quo across diverse sectors.
Witness the transformative power of Elon Musk's leadership as we discuss the cultural overhaul he's instigating at Twitter. Through a rigorous evaluation of employee loyalty and competence, Musk is forging a more resilient and focused team, reflective of the 'hardcore' working environment he champions. This episode not only charts Musk's relentless pursuit of excellence but also delves into the principles that underpin his decision-making process. Join us as we contemplate the influences of Musk's passion for learning and how the biographies he reads continue to refine his vision and strategies, providing a playbook for success in the unpredictable world of tech and innovation.
Elon Musk's leadership style may not mesh with everyone, but his passionate pursuit of transformative vision, combined with his intense work, ethic and confidence in his convictions, has undeniably shaped the culture and trajectory of his ventures. His approach is characterized by a strong insistence on adherence to quality and an iterative process of improvement, all aimed at achieving objectives that many would seem impossible. It is the mix of incision, technical acumen, decisive action and relentless pursuit of lofty goals that has become emblematic of Elon Musk's leadership. I read the biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson Really interesting read. I learned a lot about Elon Musk and his approach to having a hardcore culture in his businesses, being decisive, iterating over problems and executing, and also reading to lead. So let's get started into some of the notes that I have here. Elon Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. Some of the excerpts here out of his childhood from the book Reading remained Musk's psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch. So Elon Musk, during his childhood he was always reading. He even said at one point that he read all the encyclopedias that his parents had because he just ran out of things to read, so he was just reading the encyclopedia. So he was always consuming books throughout his childhoods. So one of the other quotes here is physics could teach anything. Physics could teach everything about the universe, except why. That led to what he calls his adolescent existential existential crisis. I began trying to figure out what the meaning of life and the universe was, he said and I got really depressed about it Like maybe life had no meaning. So this is a period in time when Elon Musk gets really depressed in his early childhood about because he's reading philosophers like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and he's kind of getting depressed about what they're saying. Then he reads this book, the Hitchhiker's Guide, about what they're saying. Then he reads this book, the Hitchhiker's Guide, and that kind of it's like a kind of a comedy book, but it has a lot of philosophical ideas in it as well and that kind of makes him feel a little bit better and he really loves that book, the Hitchhiker's Guide, and it also kind of broadens his mind. I think a little bit to space exploration, which obviously becomes a theme later on in his life. Here's another quote from the book Musk would later talk about, even joke about, having Asperger's, a common name for a form of autism spectrum disorder that can affect a person's social skills, relationships, emotional connectivity and self-regulation.
Speaker 1:He was never actually diagnosed as a kid, his mother says. But he says he has Asperger's, and I'm sure he's right. The condition was as exacerbated by his childhood traumas Whenever he would later feel bullied or threatened. His close friend, antonio Gracia, said the PTSD from his childhood would hijack his limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotional responses. As a result, he was bad at picking up social cues.
Speaker 1:I took people literally when they would say something he says, and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant. He had a preference for things that were more precise, such as engineering, physics and coding, and at even a point in time, his teachers when he was really young, actually thought that Elon was retarded. That's what they told his parents like hey, we think your kid is retarded. So Elon definitely, uh, apparently, has Asperger's and you can kind of see in his leadership style. Uh, he doesn't. He doesn't have a filter when it comes to trying to make people feel good about themselves in some situations, especially when it comes to the product of design, engineering of things when it comes to the product of design, engineering of things. And he reminds me of Steve Jobs, who, you know, will berate someone basically for not executing his vision, which we'll get to later.
Speaker 1:So in 1988, he graduates from high school and moves to Canada and then, 1992, transfers over to Pennsylvania where he starts going to school for his bachelor's degree. And then, 1995, he ends up dropping out of Stanford University PhD program after only two days to pursue his entrepreneurial aspirations in the areas of the internet, renewable energy and outer space. So, uh, there's a quote from the book here. It says, uh, elon Musk says most PhDs are irrelevant. The number that actually moved the needle is almost none.
Speaker 1:And and I watched a uh interview that Elon Musk did with Kevin Rose I think it is on the SpaceX floor and Kevin Rose asked Elon Musk how did you learn to be an entrepreneur? Obviously, elon Musk has run several, many different businesses. So he's like how did you learn this? Did you learn this in school, or what did you learn this? He's like no, I just learned this from biographies, reading biographies. He cited Benjamin Franklin's biography, steve Jobs, tesla, einstein in different interviews. So he was definitely a big reader of biographies and that just makes me feel like we're on track. You know, you and I are interested in the folks that are successful. We're reading their biographies and their autobiographies and getting those insights. Elon Musk was doing this. We've also seen Jeff Bezos has done this. Jeff Bezos, as we covered in a previous episode, he was reading Sam Walton's autobiography and picked out a lot of ideas out of Sam Walton's autobiography. Napoleon all through his childhood he was reading biographies of Charlemagne, alexander the Great, understanding their strategies and tactics in warfare, and so this is the right path. It seems like just again and again we see this over and over again that the folks that are making an impact in the world are learning from the folks that came before them.
Speaker 1:So in 1995, elon Musk co-found Zip2 with his brother, and this is a company that provides business directories for newspapers. It's basically kind of like Google maps, sort of early version of that, and this is 1995. So the internet was just coming out and at this point you know he had a huge amount of debt from school. He had no money, so he was basically negative equity on his personal balance sheet. Uh, he didn't. He had. He had a, he had an office, but he didn't have an apartment. He could only afford one. So he basically rented an office. He showered at the YMCA down the street because he couldn't afford an apartment. He just slept on a mattress in his office. And so he's developing, doing all this coding to, to develop this zip to software, and there's only a few people working. You know him and his brother, I think one other person, and then they had a few sales people on commission that were going out and trying to sell this to newspapers and media companies, and so they ended up getting traction.
Speaker 1:One of the things that Elon Musk said that he learned during the startup phase was that success wasn't just about dreaming up the right ideas as much as it is about discovering and then rapidly discarding the wrong ones. So this is a theme that we'll see over and over again with. Elon Musk is iterating through things, not doing a lot of planning or analyzing, it's just action. He's really action bias, and so here's a quote you start off with an idea, and that idea is mostly wrong, and then you adapt that idea and keep refining it and you listen to criticism and then engage in sort of a recursive self-improvement, keep iterating on a loop that says am I doing something useful for other people? Because that's what a company is supposed to do? That's a really good quote. Basically, when you're developing your business, improving it, ask yourself that question Am I doing something useful for people? Because that's what a company, the whole purpose of it, that's what it's supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1:Zip2 ends up getting traction and growing it pretty well and they ended up selling it. So they sell it in 1999 to Compaq. Compaq acquires Zip2 for $307 million and Musk receives $22 million for his 7% share in the company. And Elon Musk wanted to be the CEO of Zip2, but he basically ended up getting ousted and not able to actually lead the company. He was sort of young at the time and he perceived as not mature enough to lead that company. So they put experienced executives to run the company. But what we see at Zip2 is Musk's leadership was characterized by impatience, having a challenging work culture. He had very high expectations of the folks that worked with him and he had a tendency to dive directly into solving problems. He was all about solving problems beyond the ground floor and understanding the technical pieces of everything. Understanding the technical pieces of everything. So shortly after, in 1999, after a compact, purchased zip to musk co-founders xcom, an online payment company. You guys are probably like, hey, that sounds familiar, co-founding xcom, that sounds familiar. Obviously, now Twitter has changed to xcom, and so this is actually an idea from back in 1999 that Elon Musk started back then. That was new to me. I didn't realize that Elon Musk had actually already had a company called xcom and him buying Twitter is actually connected to that, so we'll get to that later.
Speaker 1:In 1999, he wanted to disrupt the financial industry. Something he realized in college was that the financial industry was very archaic. They were ripe for disruption. They weren't embracing the internet in any kind of way, and he realized that most money in the world was not physical cash. It was basically digital ledgers and banking systems. So he wanted to create an online money transfer company, and so that's what he did with xcom and this xcom and another company that was started by Peter Thiel was PayPal, and the two of these companies ended up being competitors.
Speaker 1:Now, initially, both these companies, especially XXcom, had to go through a lot of legal requirements to be able to transact online with money. So they got through all those legal requirements and during this time at XXcom, elon Musk also kind of identified this issue of designing and creating something, it needs to be a closely knit team. So here's a quote from the book Separating the design of a product from its engineering was a recipe for dysfunction. Designers had to feel the immediate pain if something they designed was hard to engineer and so he just identified like, when you have a designing team and a production team and they are not working together, well, you're going to be slower to iterate problem solving, and so this could be a lesson that we look at in our companies. Is there some component in our business where one person is doing something that's related to another thing, and if there's not a good communication or a good process in place between those two actions, is it going to slow down our responsiveness in our business? So maybe it's sales and production. If you don't have a good handoff process, uh, between the sales person and the production manager, you might have a lot of friction points. So trying to figure out how can we structure things to make our businesses responsive and thrive.
Speaker 1:So Xcom and PayPal were basically competing against each other. They're doing a lot of price cuts, trying to get the network effect, get the most amount of customers, and because of that race towards getting that network effect, having the most customers and winning. Both of them were basically losing money. So they decided to combine Xcom and PayPal and do a business combination, and they did that and Elon Musk ends up becoming the CEO of, basically, paypal. They took the name PayPal after that and he's also the largest shareholder and so he's leading the company, and there's a lot of tension between Elon Musk and the CEOs.
Speaker 1:And here's a quote from the book Listen only the arrogant are self-confident enough to push their creative ideas to others. Elon said Steve Jobs believed that he was right. He was always right and he was willing to push harder and longer than other people who might've had equally good ideas but who caved under the pressure. So here we can see that Elon Musk basically embracing Steve Jobs' style of leadership, where he has a vision in place and he is pushing everybody to get to that vision and unless you convince him with data that he's wrong, he's going to pursue that vision to any end. And so this rubs people wrong in PayPal.
Speaker 1:Basically, there's a coup when Elon is on his honeymoon, when he goes on his honeymoon. He hadn't taken off any days off, but he finally took a day off, a few days off and went on his honeymoon and there was a coup. They basically voted Elon Musk out as the CEO and the folks that were on Elon Musk's side. They came to Elon like, hey, we can fight this, we can try to get you back as a CEO. And he said, no, let's just go ahead and let it be. And he didn't want to basically destroy PayPal with an internal fighting. So he had a strong emotional connection and he actually compared PayPal to harming his own child, like if he was going to try to fight the coup. That happened. And then in 2002, paypal is acquired by eBay for 1.5 billion in stock, which Elon Musk receives 165 million of that.
Speaker 1:And so here's a quote from the book for the second time in three years, musk had been pushed out of a company. He was a visionary who didn't play well with others and and again, this is very it keeps reminding me of Steve jobs. Like he, he can push people to do impossible things, but in these first couple of companies he's not able to really stay in power long enough to get what he wants fully. Then he ends up getting kicked out. Here's another quote from the book. Musk says after I got assassinated by the PayPal coup leaders like Caesar, being stabbed in the Senate. I could have said you guys, you suck. But I didn't. If I'd done, that Founders Fund wouldn't have come through in 2008 and SpaceX would be dead. I'm not into astrology, but karma may be real. So, basically, he didn't burn bridges when he got kicked out of PayPal. He maintained a friendship with Peter Thiel, who had the Founders Fund, and later would help him out when he needed help at SpaceX.
Speaker 1:So in 2002, after the sale of PayPal, elon Musk immediately starts going into his next venture here and he's wanting to start SpaceX. He basically wants the goal being he wants to reduce space transportation costs so that he can colonize Mars. And here's a quote from the book experts asking to borrow their old engine manuals. At a gathering of PayPal alumni in Las Vegas, he sat in a cabana by the pool reading a tattered manual of a Russian rocket engine. One of the alums, mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next. Musk answered I'm going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind and multi-planetary civilization. What way? His reaction was unsurprising dude, you're bananas. So just coming out of PayPal. Now he's refocused. Okay, now my next goal is to colonize Mars.
Speaker 1:And this is kind of going back to the hitchhiker's guide. He he's had an interest in physics and space export exploration throughout his life so far and he kind of identified this early as something he wanted to do. He just didn't have the ability to really get into this. But now that he's done Zip2, got a multimillionaire coming out of that, and then now PayPal has sold him, he made another a hundred plus million. Now he's he has the actual ability to to to go after this goal. So now he is all in with SpaceX.
Speaker 1:Here's another quote from the book, and this quote was in reference to basically how we were landing on the moon and doing a lot of space exploration with NASA decades ago, but we haven't really made much progress. When he said this it was early 2000s and so he wanted to keep pushing that improvement. Get us back in the space exploration game. Get us back in the space exploration game. One of the other quotes from the book is if you were negative or thought something couldn't be done, you were not invited to the next meeting. Mueller recalls he just wanted people who would make things happen. And so this is when he starts SpaceX.
Speaker 1:He's very action biased. He has a bias for action. He's not really into planning too much, he wants to just execute. Here's another quote from the SpaceX president Shortwell, or Shotwell Shotwell, wrote a plan of action for sales. Musk took one look at it and told him that he did not care about plans, just get on with the job. I was like, oh okay, this is refreshing, I don't have to write a plan, shall we recall? Here was her first real taste of Musk management style. Don't talk about doing things, just do things. Here's another quote.
Speaker 1:Elon is brilliant. He's involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to give him a gut reaction. He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. He can get into discussions about flying a satellite and whether he can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve these equations in real time. It's amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years. I don't want to be the person who ever has to compete with Elon, you might as well leave the business and find something else fun to do. He will outmaneuver you, outthink you and out-execute you.
Speaker 1:So Elon Musk starts SpaceX in 2002, and he's pulling the team together and going through this iterative process of trying to build and launch a rocket. And so there was a lot of failures in that time period. In early SpaceX they spent a lot of money and Elon Musk was putting all his money into SpaceX and they were just failing over and over and over again. But they were failing quickly and basically Elon's thought was like if we keep iterating and failing quickly, we'll identify what works and then we'll get something that actually works up into the sky in the form of a rocket that won't explode but there was many rocket explosions and that won't explode but there was many rocket explosions. But then to transition really quick to 2004,. This is when he joins Tesla, incorporated, then called Tesla Motors as the chairman of the board and later becomes the CEO and product architect and in in Tesla he kind of uses some of the things that he's learning at SpaceX and translates them over into Tesla and he comes up with it what he calls the algorithm of how to um, how to basically think through problems. So here's the algorithm, which is the quote from the book.
Speaker 1:So, number one question every, every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department such as the legal department or the or the safety department. You need to know the real name of the person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from people are the most dangerous because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb. So the reason why this was such a number one you know, going through SpaceX, building rockets, there's a lot of legal requirements and things handed over from. You know, because they're using like NASA kind of protocols and stuff like that, and so they're like going through these line by line and trying to understand is this actually needed, or is this like an excessive safety protocol that's not really needed, or safety requirement? And so he's having he kind of learned this and passed this over to Tesla as well. You know, is this a requirement that we actually need to adopt for our process or is this just kind of something that came up that we can get rid of and delete, and this goes into the second item. So the step number one identify requirements.
Speaker 1:Step number two delete any part of the process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding them back, at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough. So he's all about getting rid of excessive steps in the in your process and if you haven't, you basically saying like if you didn't delete enough of your process, if you had, unless you had to go back and add some some of the process back. So basically streamlining your process and then. So that's number two. Number three is simple simplify and optimize. This should come up after step two.
Speaker 1:A common mistake is to simplify and optimize. This should come up after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part of a process that should not exist. So that's why you're doing the step two first You're deleting out stupid basically stupid steps or not needed steps of your process and then, once you've deleted those steps out, then you can simplify it and optimize it. Step number four is accelerate cycle time. Every process should be speeded up, but only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. So again he's emphasizing you can delete more steps than what you realize and so you don't want to try to accelerate your process unless you've already evaluated your process for any steps that can be deleted.
Speaker 1:Step number five is automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and then the bugs were shaken out. So you want to delete, simplify, streamline, optimize, accelerate and then automate. Step number five. Step one should be question the requirements, he says, make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb, and then delete, delete, delete the only rules that are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is just a recommendation. So that is his algorithm that he used at SpaceX and also Tesla that he refined during those years SpaceX and also Tesla that he refined during those years 2006,. Elon co-found SolarCity, which is a solar energy service company and current subsidiary of Tesla Incorporated. So here's a quote from the book.
Speaker 1:Musk became increasingly frustrated with the company's practices, especially the way it relied on aggressive sales that was compensated by commissions. Their sales tactics became like those schemes that go door to door, selling you boxes of knives or something Elon Musk said. His instincts had always been just the opposite. He never put much effort into sales and marketing and instead believed that if you made a great product, the sales would follow. This again reminds me of Steve Jobs, where Steve Jobs was very product focused, not much. He was also great at communicating, but there wasn't a focus on sales.
Speaker 1:Necessarily Word of mouth is the best marketing. Right? Seeing this mistake done myself, I've done it, but I've seen other companies do this is where they have an overemphasis on sales and marketing when they're not really paying attention to production, and you can have the best sales and marketing. But if your production is not performing well and you have bad word of mouth, it doesn't matter how much sales and marketing you're going to do. You're going to have a really rough time. So, um, really overemphasizing. If you're going to have a really rough time, so, um, really overemphasizing. If you're going to overemphasize something, you overemphasize your production process so that you're providing such an outstanding product, that are in service. That word of mouth is going to help you with that marketing piece. So that goes into a 2008.
Speaker 1:Spacex launches Falcon 1, the first privately developed liquid fuel launch vehicle to reach orbit. And so you know. He started SpaceX in 2002. They don't actually launch a rocket until 2008. And in that timeframe there was a lot of failures.
Speaker 1:So here's a quote from the book optimism, pessimism. Whatever Elon Musk answered, we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell bent on making it work. Here's another quote Musk took an iterative approach to design Rockets, and engines would be quickly prototyped, tested, blown up, revised and tried again until finally something worked. Quickly prototyped, tested, blown up, revised and tried again until finally something worked. Move fast, blow things up, repeat. It's not how well you avoid problems, mueller said. It's how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it. Again, elon is not about planning or avoiding mistakes. He's about executing, then solving the problems, fixing the mistake, and then repeat, rinse and repeat. Another quote from the book. The important thing with Elon, he says, is that if you told him the risks and showed him the engineering data, he would make a quick assessment and let the responsibility shift from your shoulders. To his Another quote, musk has a rule about responsibility Every part of the process, every specification, needs to have a name attached.
Speaker 1:He can be quick to personalize blame when something goes wrong. Elon wants transparency on requirements and also responsibility. Who owns what process? If you're familiar with Traction by Geno Wickman, this is what is recommended in that book as well that you want to have every part of your process assigned to somebody and they're responsible for that, and so Elon Musk is very big on that. Every part, every process, every specification needs to have a name attached to it so that you can hold that person responsible if that part or process fails.
Speaker 1:And this reminds me of Rockefeller. There's a point when Andrew Carnegie goes over his house and asks Rockefeller like hey, how do you get your people to be so great? Basically, some some question to that effect. And Rockefeller basically said that he he gives people responsibility and he doesn't punish them when they make a mistake, but he will punish, punish them or get rid of them if they didn't neglect their responsibility. So he makes that distinction of you know cause people make mistakes, but as long as they didn't neglect their responsibility, they would still be on the team. So in 2010, spacex becomes the first privately funded company to launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft dragon. So this gets into the reusable rockets that basically to make space travel affordable. Elon Musk realized that you had to make rockets reusable where you can shoot them up into space, have them orbit and then come back down and use them again, and so he was able to accomplish that in 2010.
Speaker 1:And during this time, elon is very much still in the weeds, making things happen, solving problems, and one of the questions in the book is never ask your troops to do something you're not willing to do. This is also something that I experienced in being an officer in the military. That was always a big thing that was pushed on us Like don't ever ask your troops to do something that you're not willing to do. So you're you know you're in the woods leading the squad platoon. Whatever you're doing, you're sleeping on the ground, you're in the thick of the bad weather, you're doing all the things that you're asking your team to do, and your team sees this, or your platoon or your or whoever you're with, they see you doing the same things that you're asking them to do and that kind of inspires your team to to follow you. And so Elon Musk does this. He like sleeps on the the floor of the SpaceX or Tesla production room. He is there with the team to get things done, to push them.
Speaker 1:Then we have several other dates here. So 2012,. Spacex Dragon Spacecraft docks with the International Space Station, the first for a private enterprise. Then 2015, elon Musk co-found OpenAI, a nonprofit research company that promotes friendly artificial intelligence. Nonprofit research company that promotes friendly artificial intelligence. 2016, he co-found Neuralink, a company that focuses on developing brain computer interfaces. 2016, he also co-found the Boring Company, which is an infrastructure and tunnel construction company. And then 2018, he launches the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful operational rocket in the world, by a factor of two. And then 2020, spacex Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission becomes the first manned flight to the ISS launched from the United States since the space shuttle program ended in 2011. And so that gets us to the Twitter purchase in 2022. And so in 2022, elon Musk.
Speaker 1:It was a very public thing that happened on Twitter where basically Elon Musk was thinking about purchasing Twitter. Elon Musk is a heavy user of Twitter, now called X, and he felt that there was a lot of you know, this is after COVID, and so there was a lot of censorship going on online that he felt that should not be the case. And he also, like we had talked about before, he had xcom and he didn't quite. He wasn't able to fully realize his vision with xcom because he got ousted. He wasn't able to fully realize his vision with xcom because he got ousted. He actually wanted to make xcom not just a payment, a payments provider or facilitator. He also wanted to to basically have social, a social media component to xcom with payments as well. So he had a bigger vision for xcom. Paypal ended up going just narrowly focused on financial transfers and things of that nature, but he actually wanted to kind of have a bigger idea with that. So he thought that was another reason why he was interested in purchasing Twitter. And here's a quote from the book that's what Twitter could become. He said If you could combine a social network with a payments platform, you could create what I wanted xcom to be. And so he ends up purchasing Twitter after a lot of drama. And uh, so he gets in there and he uh ends up firing 75% of Twitter employees.
Speaker 1:And when he came into Twitter, the culture was like 180 degree difference from the culture he created at Tesla and SpaceX and the companies that he's run, because the companies that he has run have what he calls a hardcore culture, where they're very action oriented, focused on getting things done. He would have these certain events at Tesla or SpaceX where he would just create a ridiculous goal Like hey, we need to get all the rocket launched by tomorrow at noon, and he would get everybody in the company in on that goal and they would be working all hours of the night to meet whatever thing that he basically whatever goal he put out there, and it was just like a forcing mechanism to get people to surge in on a certain mission, regardless of whatever else was going on in their lives or whatever else was going on in the company. And he did this frequently on each company. Whereas Twitter is a very soft culture. You go to the campus. You don't have to work there. You don't have to be there in person. You can work from home. If you do work at Twitter, you can stop by their little internal coffee shop they got beanbags. You can hang around, chat with people very kind of soft culture and not very focused on the mission and actually producing work, so completely different culture than what Musk had developed at SpaceX and Tesla.
Speaker 1:And so he's coming in and he needs to completely just 180 the culture, and he also has to. He felt that Twitter was had way too many employees, there's a lot of redundancies and not needed roles, and so he felt that he could basically get rid of most people and Twitter could still do what it's supposed to do and actually start making money. So he goes through the process of firing all these Twitter employees. He does it by reviewing three things. So the first thing is one, making sure that they're loyal to making sure that the employee is competent, and number three, that they have opted into the hardcore culture. So for number one, for loyalty, he basically had his. He brought some of his employees from Tesla and SpaceX to help them kind of deal with the new Twitter purchase and getting rid of the employees that he needed to get rid of at Twitter. So he had his team go and look at the public Slack, twitter, the public Slack and Twitter internal communication and go through and identify anybody who was basically talking smack against Elon Musk before he purchased Twitter to identify. You know, this person is not going to be a loyal, you know, employee to uh, to Elon Musk. So he had his internal team go through and identify the people who won't be loyal so that they could be fired. And then, once that was done, then he had his, his team, look in and review the code written by each employee to to determine if they're competent or not. And so he had his each employee to determine if they're competent or not. And so he had his, his engineers from his other companies review the code for the Twitter employees and identify anybody who's not competent. And they fire the people who were not competent by reviewing their code.
Speaker 1:And then that's, that's the second thing that they did. And the third thing was basically have an opt-in to the hardcore culture. So they sent out an email that said hey, we're changing things here at Twitter and if you want to basically opt into this hardcore culture that we're going to implement, go ahead and click in the box below that says yes, I'm opting into this hardcore culture. And they kind of described what that would mean and they sent that out to all the Twitter employees and uh, and then they had, like, I think, um, a little over half, if I'm remembering correctly, a little over half opted into the culture, so in state is they? They ended up firing 75% of the Twitter employees using that process, and that was basically the intent was to run a leaner team that fit in with the culture.
Speaker 1:And so it's like to kind of summarize Elon Musk and his leadership style from what I learned from the biography is, you know, creating that culture that we just talked about with Twitter, and then being decisive that culture that we just talked about with Twitter and then being decisive, not being focused and hung up on plans, but having an action towards bias and iterating over problems. That's to get to the final solution. And then also leaders, or readers right, he is an avid reader who learned a lot of what he knows from reading, and that includes biographies. So I hope this was an enjoyable podcast. Definitely recommend checking out Elon Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson Super interesting. And with that, I'll see you next week.