Work ethic, urgency and building companies
- Q20 How hard should founders work?
A maniacal sense of urgency from the leader, aggressive 50th-percentile deadlines, and attacking the limiting factor.
- Q116 Should people work remotely?
He criticizes the work-from-home crowd for ignoring the people who must show up at factories and restaurants.
- Q110 Is wanting to be liked a problem when building a company?
He would love to be liked, but he will not do things contrary to the best interest of the companies in order to be liked a bit more. Doing so would diminish the company's success probability.
- Q119 Should you love the product you're making?
He said people often try to make products they think others would love but they do not love themselves. If you don't love the product, you should not expect that others will.
- Q15 How competitive is China?
He said China has a strong inherent manufacturing ability; Tesla Shanghai is a gem because the China team is talented, hard-working and trustworthy.
- Q30 How do you hire and manage people?
In rocketry you cannot bluff: if something is wrong the rocket explodes. He says physics is a harsh judge, people break human laws but not physics, and rockets are ruled by physics.
- Q118 What's your algorithm for designing products?
He describes the new production method as a profound reimagining of car-making, where the factory is as much the product as the car.
- Q39 What about unions at Tesla?
He dislikes anything creating 'lords and peasants'; the real challenge is retaining people for hard work.
- Q47 Has Tesla come close to failing?
Tesla nearly died more than once: the 2008 financing closed at 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve, hours from bouncing payroll, and in 2018 they had to hit 5,000 Model 3s a week or go bankrupt.
- Q50 Why keep Tesla and SpaceX as separate companies?
He treated the merger question as obvious rather than answering it directly, pointing to how much Tesla and SpaceX already collaborate across levels and overlapping management. He did not confirm a deal.
- Q103 Will Tesla and SpaceX merge?
He said Tesla and SpaceX already collaborate on many fronts with growing overlap, especially Terafab, but he cannot talk about combining companies on an earnings call; that has to be done with the appropriate process. He then handed the question to Tesla's general counsel.
- Q61 Will you stay CEO of Tesla?
He said he needs sufficient voting control in the companies to still be in charge. His so-called wealth is a percentage ownership in SpaceX and Tesla, it will be taxed quite heavily, and a few generations from now — if money still matters, which he does not think it will — his descendants would have a tiny fraction…
- Q115 When will you step down as CEO of X?
He needed to stabilize the organization and the product roadmap; he guessed towards the end of 2023 would be good timing to find someone else to run the company.
- Q125 What is Tesla's mission?
He said that with AI and robotics, Tesla's mission has been updated to achieving sustainable abundance.
- Q126 What did Elon promise for the Model 3?
He said it was quite likely Tesla would achieve a 5,000-car week by the end of that month.