How to Become The Next Elon Musk? 8 Key Takeaways from “Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future” by Ashlee Vance

Quick Intro

After reading “Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future” by Ashlee Vance, I have summed up 8 traits that made Elon Musk a successful entrepreneur. These lessons can be applied to your life, whether you are an entrepreneur or not, and achieve greater results.

Here are the 8 traits, and I’ll explain in detail below with quotes from the book. Enjoy!

8 Successful Traits of Elon Musk

1. Elon Musk truly wants to make the world a better place
2. Elon Musk works extremely hard, and he expects the same from his employees
3. Elon Musk can tolerate a massive amount of pressure and risk
4. Elon Musk self learns from books and people
5. Elon Musk knows how to recruit great people
6. Elon Musk is detail-minded and hands-on
7. Elon Musk is always solving problems and moving forward quickly
8. Elon Musk knows how to ask great questions

Details of each trait (with quotes from the book)

Trait #1: Elon Musk truly wants to make the world a better place

• Musk has a meaningful worldview that many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack. He wasn’t just sniffing out trends, and he wasn’t consumed by the idea of getting rich. He’s been in pursuit of a master plan all along. “ It seemed like one should try to make the world a better place because the inverse makes no sense,” says Elon. “ I don’t like to be seen like a Johnny-come-lately or that I’m chasing a fad or just being opportunistic. I’m not an investor. I like to make technologies real that I think are important for the future and useful in some sort of way.”
• Musk desires to do something meaningful with his life, something lasting. That was why he chose the solar and space industry. He believes in the technologies of Space X, Tesla, and Solarcity to the extent that he thinks they’re the right things to pursue the betterment of mankind. He viewed interplanetary travel as a solution to human extinction.

Trait #2: Elon Musk works extremely hard, and he expects the same from his employees

• Just as how Kelvin Watson put it, “Musk will outmaneuver you, outthink you, and out-execute you.”
• When Elon started his first startup — Zip2, he had this drive that this thing- whatever it was- had to get done and that if he didn’t do it, he’d miss his shot. He stakes his existence on whatever he’s building. That’s Elon. Do or die but don’t give up.
• During the competition between X.com and Paypal, Musk works 23 hours a day to rally the X.com employees to implement the tactics as fast as possible using brute-forces appeals to their competitive nature.
• To this day, Musk still expects his employees to be at work on Saturday. He constantly pushes him and those around him to their limits. He had once told an employee, “ I want you to think ahead and think so hard every day that your head hurts. I want your head to hurt every night when you go to bed.”
• Musk has no tolerance towards employees and contractors who do not meet his standard. He would often say, “The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them.” He had told his employees, “ What we have to do is fucking hard, and half-assing things won’t be tolerated.”
• Either you’re trying to make something spectacular with no compromises or you’re not. And if you’re not, Elon considers you a failure. “Elon holds Tesla up as a product company,” von Holzhausen (Chief designer at Tesla) said. “I have to deliver to him and make sure it’s beautiful and attractive.”

Trait #3: Elon Musk can tolerate massive amount of pressure & risk

• Despite all the tragedies that Musk has been through, including having a brutal upbringing by his father, being bullied at school, losing a child, being pilloried in the press by reporters, divorcing with his ex-wife, going nearly bankrupted, Musk didn’t self-sabotage. He took all the pain and kept moving forward.
• Gracias, the Tesla and SpaceX investor, and Musk’s friend said, “ He has the ability to work harder and endure more stress than anyone I’ve ever met. What he went through in 2008 would have broken anyone else. He didn’t just survive. He kept working and stayed focused. Most people who are under that sort of pressure fray. Their decisions go bad. Elon gets hyperrational. He’s still able to make very clear, long-term decisions. The harder it gets, the better he gets. Anyone who saw what he went through firsthand came away with more respect for the guy. I’ve never seen anything like this ability to take the pain.”
• Elon invests a majority of his personal money into his business. As Ed Ho, the former Zip2 executive said “ Elon is willing to take an insane amount of personal risk. When you do a deal like that, it either pays off or you end up in a bus shelter somewhere.” Musk invested 100 million into SpaceX, even before the first launch. When Tesla and SpaceX ran out of money in 2008, Musk sold his property and asked his friends for money to reinvest into the two companies. He was nearly bankrupt at that point.

Trait #4: Elon Musk self learns from books and people

• Elon reads a lot since he was young. “ It was not unusual for him to read 10 hours a day. If it was a weekend, he could read through 2 books a day,” said Kimbal Musk (Elon’s brother).
• In Canada, while studying at Queen’s University in Kingston, Musk and Kimbal would identify interesting people they would like to meet and cold call them for a meetup and learn from them.
• Musk honed his trademark style of entering an ultra-complex business and not letting the fact that he knew very little about the industry’s nuances bother him in the slightest. This applies to bank industry (X.com), space industry (SpaceX), automotive industry (Tesla), and renewable energy industry (Solar City)
• Before starting SpaceX, Musk initially relied on textbooks to form a bulk of his rocketeer knowledge. He learned how to build a rocket by reading Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion, along with several more seminal texts. Later on, he would absorb incredible quantities of information by learning from his colleagues.

Trait #5: Elon Musk knows how to recruit great people

• Elon surrounds himself with great people in the industry. When Musk built X.com, he was in Silicon Valley and recruited the best engineers. When Musk wanted to start SpaceX, he moved to Los Angeles, where he would be surrounded by the world’s top aeronautics thinkers. He then recruited an all-star crew for SpaceX, including leading rocket testers and aerospace veteran, etc.
• Musk has the ability to find bright, ambitious people and lure them to his companies. As Peter Thiel puts it, “ He has the most talented people in the aerospace industry working for him, and the same case can be made for Tesla, where, if you’re a talented mechanical engineer who likes building cars, then you’re going to Tesla because it’s probably the only company in the U.S. where you can do interesting new things. Both companies were designed with this vision of motivating a critical mass of talented people to work on inspiring things.”
• Musk is great at selling his visions to the media and potential employees. Despite not building much of anything at the beginning of X.com (an early version of Paypal), Musk told the press that he was rethinking the entire banking industry, and managed to attract engineers in Silicon Valley with his rah-rah speeches about the future of Internet banking.
• Elon’s highly ambitious and meaningful mission gains a lot of respect from his employees and motivates them to achieve the impossible day in and day out.
• Musk doesn’t say, ‘ You have to do this by Friday at two P.M. He says ‘ I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’

Trait #6: Elon Musk is detail-minded and hands-on

• Musk involves in just about everything. He understands everything. Musk even kept an eye on how his company’s money was spent.
• From time to time, Musk participated in the testing process firsthand. He was not afraid to get his hands dirty. He tested his hypothesis, moved on quickly, and come up with a new solution. An example was Musk tested the cooling chamber for SpaceX’s engine 3 times despite the hardware were found flawed afterward.
• “When Elon gets into something, he develops just this different level of interest in it than other people. That is what differentiates Elon from the rest of humanity.”

Trait #7: Elon Musk is always solving problems and moving forward quickly. He hates excuses.

• “Build quick and learn quickly” was Elon’s philosophy. At the startup stage of Tesla, the company didn’t get hung up overanalyzing a situation. The company would pick a plan of attack, and it failed at something, it failed fast and then tried a new approach.
• For Elon, the word no doesn’t exist, and he expects that attitude from everyone around him. Every one should find a way to resolve things.
• Musk does not sugarcoat things. What Musk would not tolerate were excuses or the lack of a clear plan of attack. He demands his employees to gather all the information and figure out the next thing to execute after failure.

Trait #8: Elon Musk knows how to ask great questions

• Musk listens, asks good questions, is fast on his feet, and gets to the bottom of things.
• Elon Musk’s favorite book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams points out that one of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask, once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy. I came to the conclusion that really we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. The only thing that makes sense to do is drive greater collective enlightenment.

Next Step

Think about how you can apply one of Elon’s traits in your daily life this week. For me, I’m picking “Trait #4: Self-learning from books and people”. I’m planning to learn Big Data and Machine Learning this week with my colleagues.

Leave a comment below and let me know what you want to work on! Cheers!