00:08:38 · Eric Jorgenson
[00:08:38] S1: But I also know it's just this forcing function to make everyone move faster. The purposeful 50%, like, timeline thing is actually a really good example of a meta that goes across his whole operating philosophy, which is encouraging or allowing small failures in order to make the whole, like, more robust. He... He's really focused on increasing the learning rate of his companies and moving ever closer towards this more perfect product. And the the sort of quote that encapsulates this is failure is essentially irrelevant unless it's catastrophic. And having a high iteration rate and giving young engineers, like, huge responsibility and pushing program timelines and pushing iteration speed, all of these things sort of create these small failures that make the end product better because those failures are instructive. It shows you, you know, where something breaks. You call it building the box in the sort of rocket program. Right? So you wanna push each variable to failure so that you know where it fails, so that you know where the outer limit of performance of the material or the system is, and then you just wanna be just like a scooch inside of it to cover for some variability. But if you're in the very comfortable center of the box, you have no idea what your actual true range of performance is. And in the case of something like Starship, you're giving up huge amounts of of economics if you're over engineering for redundancy and safety to a degree that you don't even understand because you've never pushed the system to the limit.
00:10:03 · Ty Morse
[00:10:03] S0: He also had a very interesting philosophy at the start of SpaceX where he would think about, like, future revenue as, you know, per day, and I think he estimated at roughly, like, $10,000,000 per day every single day that they delayed of lost future revenue. You know, he famously had this situation where at one point, he, like, took a... You know, flew a little part on a private jet to Kwaj. Yeah. It costs, a $100,000 or something because he could basically make a 100 times more money in the future, you know, fifteen years later.
00:10:30 · Eric Jorgenson
[00:10:30] S1: No. He... He's very... Where he's frugal and where he spends lavishly is really interesting, and it only makes sense through, as you point out, the lens of the time. Right? Like, the opportunity cost of time is absolutely massive. It's the fundamental currency of everything that we're doing. It's how we live our lives. It's how entrepreneurs, like, drive their companies, but people tend to be sort of penny wise and pound foolish about focusing on the currency and wasting time in order to save small amounts of money. Whereas he understands, like, if we can accelerate the timeline towards that, you know, $10,000,000 a day of revenue or that future market cap or that next inflection point in the valuation of the company, if we can achieve that a week sooner, a month sooner, a year sooner, we are going to massively collapse and increase the ROI of of everything that everybody's doing all the way along. And so in that story of, like, flying apart to Kwaj, it was probably the fact that he's got, like, 10 engineers and, you know, $30,000,000 worth of rockets that's waiting on this one part. And so, of course, a $100,000 to get the part there, you know, twenty four hours sooner or a week sooner unlocks the progress of $50,000,000 worth of capital and equipment and buys you that future, you know, revenue and valuation, which is just, you know, that that is the driving force. I think of some of this maniacal urgency that he talks, maniacal urgency is our operating principle, and nobody moves at the pace that he does. And I think it starts with that kind of understanding of opportunity cost.
00:11:59 · Ty Morse, Eric Jorgenson
[00:11:59] S0: Do you wanna touch on basically how he lives his life? I remember seeing a picture of a bunch of Diet Coke cans that are un... Like, uncaffeinated Diet Coke cans and just like a gun on his bedside table. And it's just like that's... You know, in the Chris Williamson episode, you were talking about Eight Sleep, and of course, he apparently does use an Eight Sleep when he sleeps. I don't know if he has one on his private jet, which he spends like a third of his life on. Yeah. How does he actually operate his day to day life? Like, what is he what is he doing when he wakes up in the morning? [00:12:28] S1: Yeah. I mean, my my caveat is that I've not gotten the opportunity to, like, follow or shadow him or anything, so this is all sort of trying to reconstruct from, like, what he said publicly, which is the main source of, you know, my, inputs for the book and everything like that. But I do think it's interesting that he does none of the sort of traditionally, like, quote unquote productivity stuff. Like, the most productive man on earth does not follow any of the productivity rules or gurus. [00:12:50] S0: He wakes up and goes to war.
00:12:51 · Eric Jorgenson
[00:12:51] S1: He wakes up and goes to war. He, like, wakes up, picks up his phone, looks for emergencies. There's usually an emergency, and he tackles the emergencies. The answer probably most directly is he goes wherever the problem is. He goes physically to where the problem is, which is why, you know, his private jet sort of view for the year of all these trips is just, like, bouncing all over the world all the time. I'd be really curious to compare his calendar or schedule or or kind of a retrospective on how he spends his time compared to other... Just say, Fortune 500 CEOs or tech CEOs who, it seems to me, tend to run a pretty regimented schedule of, like, alright. I meet with these people this week, these people this week. You know, we got a board meeting. We got this. We got that. And it seems that Elon, I think at one point, like, fired his his scheduler Assistant. Yeah. His assistant who did the scheduling, and it was just like, I just... I need to respond to wherever the fire is. I need to go wherever the most important thing is. And maybe many CEOs can't operate that way because they don't have the infrastructure in place. I mean, he's surrounded by experts and professionals and incredible managers and leaders and engineers who are making sure that everything else stays on the rails. But the the founder or the CEO or this kind of this person, the guy, whoever that is in the company or girl, has a a unique power to sort of bestow, like, energy and attention on the bottleneck. And so to just parachute in and use that charisma, that force of will, that attention, that, like, eye of Sauron to just zoom in on wherever the bottleneck is, wherever the problem is, and just push that solution through, push that solution through and break through anything, that's holding them back from solving it.
00:14:29 · Ty Morse, Eric Jorgenson
[00:14:29] S0: Yeah. I think the founders have a unique ability or, like, they're allowed to make decisions that other hired gun CEOs are just not allowed to make because they've seen... They've basically grown... You know, raised the baby. [00:14:43] S1: Brian Armstrong talks about that. I think in his... Your interview with him, he talked about, like, being totally unafraid to go back to zero because he knew he built this whole house brick by brick. And he's like, you know, that gives me this incredible, not just moral authority, but personal confidence to, you know, renovate the company at a moment's notice.