Notes on The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgensen
I just finished The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgensen — same guy who wrote The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. It's a curated collection built entirely from public material on Elon Musk: interviews, talks, tweets, biographies. No politics, no family drama, no fluff. Just the operating principles.
What I liked is that it's ruthlessly focused on being useful to entrepreneurs and builders. So these are my raw notes. Structured roughly the way the book is structured, with the bits that actually stuck with me.
If I had to compress the whole thing down to three things, it'd be:
Boundless optimism
Hardcore work ethic
Unabashed courage
Now the longer version.
Pursue Purpose
Be useful to the world. Fight for what you want to see happen.
Don't start a company for the sake of it, or just to make money. Ask: what is something useful for the world or your country that you wish existed? Start there.
Maintain OCD over quality of product. It's just non-negotiable.
Do what you really, really love — otherwise it's not worth pursuing or spending your life on. Life is too short for that. When you actually love it, the pain becomes gladly bearable.
The customers don't know what they want until you give it to them.
Grow the pie. Don't get stuck in the zero-sum mindset.
Work like hell. 80–100 hrs a week. You can't accomplish anything significant on 40 hr work weeks. This is the easiest way to double output and halve the time it takes to get there.
Feel the fear, look it in the eye, and do it anyway if it's important enough.
Think like a physicist. Obsess over the truth. Physics is law. Everything else is just a recommendation.
If something seems outrageous but is still supported by physics, do it. If it isn't, then it's not worth pursuing.
Critical thinking, the physicist way
Do you have the right axioms? (foundational principles in math & logic accepted as absolute truth)
Are they relevant?
Are you making the right conclusions based on those truths?
This is the opposite of wishful thinking.
For most of life, think in terms of analogy. For something important enough, think in terms of first principles.
How to actually apply first principles thinking:
Break something down to its most fundamental principles
Ask: what am I most confident is true at a foundational level? That sets your axiomatic base
Reason up from there
Check your conclusions against the axiomatic truths
Make sure you aren't violating physics
Think in terms of taking ideas to their absolute limits. Take an idea and imagine scaling it to a very large number, or a very small one. How do things change? Break the barriers in your own thinking about what limits actually exist. Simple changes can cascade and provide exponential results.
In terms of design — we usually take individual items and figure out how to best assemble them into a product. Another way: imagine the perfect, most ideal product, picture how items might be arranged at the atomic level, and then redesign the parts to come closer and closer to that ideal. Approach design from both ends.
Consider what's possible within the absurd. If it's possible in theory, ask yourself, what would it take?
Try to be less wrong. We are wrong most of the time. Just try to be less and less so.
Read as many books as you can. Elon didn't know anything about hardware or carbon fibre, let alone rockets. He read a lot of books, talked to experts over time, and figured it out. Rocket science was self-taught. The recipe is simple — read books and talk to people.
Things we take for granted today — flying, accessing info from anywhere in the world — would've seemed like magic 200 years ago. That's the power of engineering.
Technology wins wars. A decisive technological advantage can compensate for almost any other factor. America made the nuclear bomb before the Germans did, and that alone ended the war.
Ideas are overrated. Executing good ones AND maintaining positive cash flows is the real deal.
Ultra Hardcore Work
Advance the cause you believe in. The reward is advancing the cause itself.
Being CEO is a huge responsibility, not some sort of freedom. You're responsible for solving the toughest problems no one else internally was able to.
Never work for a boss with a management degree. They just don't understand engineering and why it's important to spend there.
Sleep on the factory floor where everyone can see you. The workers should be inspired by you. If you take that level of pain, the workers will be inspired to share some of it too.
Never ask the troops to do what you're not willing to do. Show up. Try it a couple of times yourself.
Create an extremely flat hierarchy. There should be almost no difference between engineers and executives — no special privileges, no reserved parking, no separate cubicles. Managers should work at the forefront, in the same environment as the team. Someone should be able to start as a trainee and someday lead the company.
Managers should take care of their teams before themselves. The supervisor is there to serve the team, not the other way round.
All managers should stay in touch with their technical craft. Software managers should spend at least 20% of their time coding.
Always keep smashing your ego.
Challenges make you stronger. The bigger the challenge, the stronger you become. You must have a high threshold for pain.
Smart people don't need to be managed. They manage themselves. They just need to be aligned on a goal and do whatever's needed to accomplish it. Do everything you can to gather great people.
When hiring, look for exceptional ability or exceptional aspiration. Have they faced tough problems and overcome them?
Being excellent is the minimum passing grade.
A strong sense of purpose attracts the very best talent in the world. Work that's enjoyable, financial rewards that are great, AND a product that changes the world — that's a hell of a set of motivators. Look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught.
Don't try to be liked by everyone. You tend to compromise then. Success of the enterprise is the only thing that matters.
Remove organizational boundaries. Effective, seamless communication is extremely important. It should flow freely across the org.
Go as close to the source of the problem as possible — physically, if suitable.
Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it's catastrophic.
Review whether the organization actually incentivizes innovation, and make sure it's optimized for it.
Don't punish for failure as long as people gave their best. Otherwise people start making safe, conservative choices, and innovation dies.
If you can't tell the four ways you fucked something up before getting it right, then you were not the one doing the real work.
If we aren't failing occasionally, we aren't trying hard enough.
Simplicity saves costs and improves reliability. Fewer lines of code, fewer components, fewer moving parts. Look at every tiny process and ask: is this really necessary?
The Algorithm
Make your requirements less dumb. Question them. Be perfectly clear. Make sure they are absolutely needed and currently relevant. Simplify them.
Try very hard to delete the part or process. Go hardcore into deleting anything unnecessary or borderline. Lose weight. More moving parts is more burden. Only retain what is absolutely needed.
Simplify or optimize. This is step 3 deliberately — you don't want to optimize a thing that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Accelerate. Once there's no further scope to simplify, accelerate the cycle. Direction is set, now move faster.
Automate. Do this only after everything is set up to near perfection. Automating too early is a serious mistake.
Maniacal urgency
Keep meetings to an absolute minimum, and only with a required, beneficial audience. Don't waste people's time.
Move at breakneck speed. Time is the only true currency.
You can't compete with industry giants on size. You have to overcompensate with intelligence, speed, and output per unit of time.
Every day we are slow to achieve our goals is a day of missing out or delaying our target.
Don't serialize too much. Don't pile on dependencies unless there's no other option. Do things in parallel as much as possible.
Set aggressive timelines. It's okay to scrap money or equipment. It's not okay to scrap time.
We must make stuff
The factory is the product. The machine that makes the machines.
Design is overrated. Manufacturing is underrated. It's hard. Working on the production system is more important and more intense than the product itself.
Theory of constraints — you're only as fast as the slowest moving part.
Building Companies
Elon started Zip2 around age 24. Sold to Compaq for $300 million at 28.
Went all in with PayPal that same year. 14 months later, X.com merged with Confinity, valuation jumped to $500 million.
Learn to listen to feedback and seek it. Pay close attention to the negative ones.
Sometimes you're wrong. Just pick one and go. Moving fast is important.
Life is too short for long-term grudges.
At 31, PayPal was sold to eBay for $4.5 billion.
He started Tesla with the mission of making energy sustainable, and in parallel — SpaceX and SolarCity.
The most important thing is to start somewhere, be prepared to question your assumptions, fix what you did wrong, and adapt to reality.
All of his companies were on the absolute brink of collapse and bankruptcy at some point.
If we charge for something, it's not because we want to make things more expensive; it's because we can't figure out how to make it less expensive.
If you're trying to make a perfect product, attention to detail is essential.
First cater to the rich and wealthy. They have discretionary income. Then optimize for costs and cater to the masses.
Focus on signal over noise. If the effort you're putting in isn't improving the product or service directly, stop working on it.
Go for extreme levels of precision.
Tesla doesn't advertise or pay for endorsements. They put that money into making the product great.
Be pathologically optimistic. You'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right. At least you'd enjoy the attempt and the journey.
Initially people think there's no way forward. Once you show them there is a way, you get a lot of support.
If something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
There have been many times where I expected to lose everything. I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or incapacitated for that.
The first goal is to make the damn thing work. We'll optimize it later.
You have to push the envelope, get close to the edge to break the limits. Build up to the just-barely-possible. As long as it doesn't break any laws of physics, it's possible.
Before launching anything, analyze the risks and review the risk list. But you don't design to eliminate every risk — otherwise you'll never get anywhere.
Eliminate what isn't necessary to solve the key problem.
On Behalf of Humanity
Making breakthroughs with an epic team is far more rewarding than money.
Don't disrupt for the sake of disrupting. The focus should be making quality of life better for everybody.
Work on things that you find interesting, fulfilling, and that contribute some good to the rest of society.
Go do it. Just go out there and do it. People are far too afraid to try. Fear is the biggest reason for failure. Don't be afraid to fail. Just go. If you don't push for radical breakthroughs, you're not going to get radical outcomes.
Progress doesn't happen automatically. A lot of incredibly smart people need to work their ass off to make it happen. It doesn't just happen naturally over time.
The internet is a great leveler for information and education. You can learn anything online for free.
He has a grand vision, a strong why that propels him to bear the pain and keep going.
Closing thought
The through-line for me is the physicist's posture — reason from first principles, take ideas to their limits, and never confuse what's conventional with what's true. Pair that with a maniacal sense of urgency and a willingness to look stupid in pursuit of something that matters, and you have something very close to the operating system this book describes.
Worth a read if you're building anything.
Source: https://www.elonmuskbook.org/