Elon Musk

`3:33:41`

I don't know what that is. Actually, I've never actually seen, maybe you could speak to that. He's good at finding greatness. — I don't think he's finding as much as he's attracting. He's attracting the talent because of the audacious of his goals and his mission. The clarity by which he states it. He doesn't have to go scour the earth to find the best people. The best people come to him because he is, talking about Elon here, one of the singular most invigorating figures. In both the same order of the universe here, haters and lovers, right? Like he's having such an impact at such a scale that of course he's gotta have literally millions of people think he's the worst person in the world and he's also gonna have millions of people thinking he's the greatest gift to humanity. Depending on the day. I'm somewhere in between. But I'm more on the greatest gift to humanity end of the scale than I'm on the other end of the scale. And I think that really inspires people in a way that we've almost forgotten that that level of audacity is so rare that when we see it,

`3:34:46`

we don't fully know how to analyze it. We think of Elon as finding great talent and I'm sure he is also good at that. But I also think that this beacon of the mission, we're going to fucking Mars. We're gonna transform transportation into using electricity. We're gonna cover the earth in internet is so grand that there are days where I wake up and go like, what the fuck am I doing with these to- do lists? Like Jesus, should I go sign up for something like that? Yeah, that sounds invigorating in a sense. I can only imagine like a biking back in 10, 50 going like, should we go to Normandy? You may die along the way, but oh boy, does that sound like a journey and an adventure. — There's a few components. There's one definitely this bigger than life mission and really believing it. You know, every other sentence is about Mars, like really believing it. It doesn't really matter what, like anybody else, the criticism, anything. There's a very singular focused big mission.

`3:35:49`

But I think it also has to do a bunch of the other components. Like being able to hire well once the people, once the beacon attracts. And I've just seen people that don't necessarily on paper have a resume with the track record. I've seen really who now turned out to be like legendary people. He basically like tosses 'em the ball of leadership. Sees something in them and says like, "You go." And gives them the ownership and they run with it. And that happens at every scale. That there's a real meritocracy. And like there's something, there's just like, you could see the flourishing of human intellect in these meetings, in these group getting together where they're like, the energy is palpable. It's like exciting for me to just be around that. There's not many companies I've seen that in because when a company becomes successful and larger, it somehow suffocates that energy.

`3:36:50`

I guess you see in startups at the early stages. But like it's cool to see it at a large company that's actually able to achieve scale, you know? — I think part of the secret there is that Elon actually knows things. And when you know things, you can evaluate the quality of work products. And when you can evaluate the quality of work products, you can very quickly tell who's full of shit and who will actually take you to Mars. And you can fire the people who's full of shit and you can bet on the people who get us to Mars. That capacity to directly evaluate the competency of individuals, it's actually a little bit rare. It's not widely distributed amongst managers, hiring managers. It's not something you can easily delegate to people who are not very skilled at the work itself. And Elon obviously knows a lot about a lot and he can smell who knows stuff for real.