Musk pairs aggressive deadlines with live engineering reviews

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 2:11:10

   is the this is the thing that can scale um and i'm curious why you think other organizations of your like spacex and tesla are really big companies now and you're still able to keep that culture what goes wrong with other companies such that they're not able to do that i don't know um but like today you said you had like a bunch of spacex meetings like what is it that you're doing there that's like keeping that that's adding urgency yeah yeah well i don't know i guess uh the urgency is going to come from where i was leading the company so my sense of urgency i've like a maniacal sense of urgency so that maniacal sense of urgency projects through the rest of the company is it because of consequences they're like if you know elon said a crazy deadline but if i don't get minute. I know what happens to me. Is it just, um,

2. 2:12:00

   You're able to identify bottlenecks and get rid of them so people can move fast. How do you think about why your companies are able to move fast? Yeah, I'm constantly addressing the limiting factor. I mean, on the deadlines front, I mean, I generally actually try to aim for a deadline that I at least think is at the 50th percentile. So it's not like an impossible deadline, but it's the most aggressive deadline I can think of that could be achieved with 50-week set probability, which means that it will be late half the time.

3. 2:12:42

   There is a law of Geist's expansion that applies to schedules. Whatever schedule, if you said we're going to do this something in five years, which To me, it's like infinity time. It will expand to a fully available schedule, and it will take five years. There's a physical limit. Physics will limit how fast you can do certain things. Scaling up manufacturing, there's a rate at which you can move the atoms and scale manufacturing.

4. 2:13:16

   That's why you can't instantly make a million of something, a million years a year or something. you've got a design manufacturing line you've got to bring it up, you've got to ride the S-curve of production so I guess what can I say that's actually helpful to people I think generally a maniacal sense of urgency is a very big deal so and you want to have an aggressive schedule um and then you and you and you want to figure out what the limiting factor is at any point in time and and help the team address that limiting factor can you maybe talk about the so starlink was slowly in the works for many years uh and yeah we talked about it all the way in the beginning of the company yeah and so then there was a team you had built in redmond and then at one point you decided this team is just not cutting us but again how did you like it went for a few years

5. 2:14:20

   slowly and so why did this why didn't you act earlier and why did you act when you did like why was that the right moment at which to act i mean i have i have these very detailed um engineering reviews weekly um that that's that that's maybe a very unusual level of granularity I don't know anyone who runs a company or at least a manufacturing company that goes with the level of detail that I go into.

6. 2:14:52

   So it's not as though, like I have a pretty good understanding of what's actually going on because we go through things in detail. And I'm a big believer in skip level meetings where the individuals, instead of having the the person that reports to me say things. It's everyone that reports to them says something in the technical review. And there can't be advanced preparation. So otherwise, you're going to get glazed, as I say these days.

7. 2:15:31

   Yeah, exactly. Very Gen Z of you. Very Gen Z. How do you prevent advanced administration? You just call them randomly? No, just go around the room and everyone provides an update. So, I mean, it's a lot of information to keep in your head because you've got, say, if you have meetings weekly or twice weekly, you've got a snapshot of what that person said, and you can then plot the progress points. you can sort of mentally plot the points under COVID and say, are we converging to a solution or not? Or are we, you know, like I'll take drastic action only when I conclude that success is not in a set of possible outcomes. So when I say, okay, when I finally reach the conclusion that, okay, unless drastic action is done, we have no chance of success, then I must take drastic action.

8. 2:16:32

   And so that's, I came to that conclusion in 2018, took drastic action and fixed the problem. How many, you know, you've got many, many companies and in each of them, it sounds like you do this kind of deep engineering understanding of what the relevant bottlenecks are so you can do these reviews with people. Yeah. You've been able to scale it up to five, six, seven companies. Because within one of these companies, you have many different mini-companies within them.

9. 2:17:04

   What determines the max amount here? Because you have like 80 companies? 80? No. But you have so many already. That's already remarkable to me. Why this current number? Yeah, exactly. I know. We barely keep one company together. It depends on situation. um so um i actually don't don't have regular meetings uh with foreign company so that the foreign company is sort of cruising along like look if basically if something is working well and making good progress then there's no point in me spending time on it so i actually uh allocate time according to where where the where the limiting factor or the problem where are things problematic and um or where are we pushing against uh like what what is holding us back well you know i i focus at the risk of saying the words too many times the limiting factor

10. 2:18:03

    um so so it basically something's good like the irony is if something's going really well um they don't see much of me but if something's going badly they'll see a lot of me or not even badly it's like if something's a limiting factor it's a limiting factor exactly it's not exactly very badly but it's the thing that's it's the thing that we need to make go faster to and so when something's a limiting factor at spacex or tesla are you like talking weekly and daily with the engineer that's working on it how does that actually work most things that are limiting factor are um weekly and some things are twice weekly so the The AI5 chip review is twice weekly, and so it's every Tuesday and Saturdays is the chip review.

11. 2:18:50

    Is it open-ended in how long it goes? Technically, yes, but usually it's like two or three hours. Sometimes less. It depends on how much information you've got to go through. That's another thing. I'm just trying to tease out the differences here because the outcomes seem quite different.