00:00:00 · Ty Morse
[00:00:00] S0: Today, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Eric Jorgenson, who is the author of The Book of Elon. And I think it's super great for more people to basically understand how Elon operates, and so I wanted to do this conversation. Let's start with why is Elon able to outcompete everyone?
00:00:16 · Eric Jorgenson
[00:00:16] S1: This question is exactly why I wrote the book because I think he is absolutely singular, and I think so much of what he does is replicatable. The answer in a few sentences is he's on an unbelievably grand and glorious purposeful mission that unites people and inspires them to work harder than they ever have been before. He has a knack for working on the right thing at the right time, which is right now with incredible intensity and addressing it in not just an incremental improvement, but a step function improvement. And a lot of people talk about his first principles thinking or his speed of execution, but they miss that those ideas all multiply each other's effectiveness. He's 10,000 times more effective than other people, not because he's 10,000 times smarter, but because each of those improvements don't just add, they multiply. And that's why he's an outlier among outliers. Like, there is nobody alive who is operating at the level that he's operating, even though there's a lot of really smart people building unprecedented things. And that question, like, what is he doing differently is, you know, Brian Armstrong has talked about it. Mark Andreessen has talked about it. Like, the central question, like, can everything just be better and more efficient and more effective? And what if we were all capable of 10 times, a 100, a thousand times more than we're doing right now? I think that's what Elon shows us and what I hope people get out of the book.
00:01:53 · Ty Morse
[00:01:53] S0: I have this interesting theory. He's got, like, different stages of who he's been over the last thirty years since he started Zip2 in, like, 1996, where initially he was just grinding on software companies. And I think at that point, he was just mostly working on software and sales. But then there was this stage between two thousand and one ish and 2010 where he just didn't want to be CEO, but he he was forced into the position of being CEO, and he would go on interviews basically talking about how he really didn't want to be CEO. And then somewhere around two thousand eleven, twelve, thirteen, he just stops talking about that. I think most people just haven't studied him and seen that transition. But I think that there was, like, different evolutions of him, and I'd be curious to know what kind of made that switch.
00:02:37 · Eric Jorgenson
[00:02:37] S1: He is at core an engineer and a product guy. Right? And Zip2 and and PayPal both, were such products driven companies that sort of an engineering approach could make the company successful. And they were both relatively short duration companies. Like, they sold in the first, you know, I think it was five or six years in the case of Zip2 and, like, two or three years in the case of PayPal, but that was a lot of life that lived very quickly. And so that's just a fundamentally different thing than Tesla and SpaceX where you have to create alignment and vision and product iterations over, a decade plus. And he has this great line where he's like, I realize you couldn't be fully in control of the product unless you were also in control of the company. And you do see that in, you know, Steve Jobs and Wozniak were, like, eventually Jobs became CEO even though... Or or became sort of sole controller of the company even though, he and Woz started it as collaborators because he's like, I I need sole visionary control of this product. And I think Elon is kind of the same way. He says he made a... He calls it a moral error early in Tesla where he was like, I was trying to have my cake and eat it too. I wanted to sort of control the company without running the company, and that was that kind of, like, 2002 to 2008 era, where Tesla was just off to a really messy start where he was providing the funding. He was chairman of the board. Martin Eberhard was the CEO, and he... But he had, like, was sending him opinions and product ideas and, like, demands and all this stuff all the time. And it was just chaotic. And eventually, when Tesla was, like, on the verge of death in in 2008, Elon was like, I I know there was that inflection
00:04:15 · Ty Morse, Eric Jorgenson
[00:04:15] S0: point where basically Martin knew the cost of a Roadster, and Elon went to, like, the engineers that were on the line or, you know, were working on it and basically asked for a line item, you know, breakdown of exactly what the costs were. And I think Martin Eberhard said something on the order of the Roadster cost, like, 120,000 to make, and the actual number was closer to $1.50. Yeah. And Elon knew the number, and Elon knew that Martin knew the number. [00:04:40] S1: Yeah. [00:04:40] S0: And he thought that basically there was like a permanent break in trust.
00:04:40 · Ty Morse, Eric Jorgenson
[00:04:40] S0: And he thought that basically there was like a permanent break in trust. [00:04:44] S1: Yeah. And and I think that was after a period of realizing that they didn't actually know the number. They they were like, what is this thing that we are selling cost? And, like, Martin and I didn't know. So, alright. They both went and tried to figure it out. And, yeah, it it was... That was a very ugly period. That was at the end of a whole bunch of kind of disagreements and challenges that they'd been through, But it did push Elon into that position of, like, I have to be CEO. I don't wanna be. It comes with a lot of chores. It comes with a lot of responsibilities. You're at the nexus of everything. But if I want this company to be successful, you know, I have to fully internalize and take responsibility for it, and that's what he did even though he was also in the same position at at SpaceX. And the fact that both of these companies are improbable, iconic, and that he funded and led them both in parallel is like... I I wrote in the introduction of the book. It's like running a two minute mile twice at the same time. It is just so improbable and so, it is such a higher degree of difficulty than most people can conceive of, and the fact that it worked is still unbelievable. Biology, his blurb on the book is, like, the better you are, the better you realize how good Elon is. And that is, like... Which is why Mark Andreessen and Brian Armstrong and you and me and so many people are like, how does he do it? What is he doing differently?