Starting and building
Elon Musk
First principles
Elon Musk (Contemporary · 1971–) — First principles.
What actually happened?
2008 was the year it nearly ended. The first three Falcon 1 launches failed, Tesla could not fund production of the Roadster, and the money was gone. The fourth Falcon flew in September and reached orbit; the Tesla financing closed on Christmas Eve. He has said that if the fourth launch had failed there was nothing left for a fifth. The interesting part is not the survival. It is that the same method produced three catastrophic failures and then the thing nobody else had done, and there was no way to tell those apart from inside.
Physics is law; the rest is advice
The limit of any technology is set by physical law, not by what the current industry can do. Working back from the physical limit rather than forward from today's practice changes what counts as an acceptable answer, and forces engineering that the incremental route never reaches.
Asking how much lighter this can be given the material produces a different programme from asking how much lighter than last year's.
Most of the week should go into making the thing
He has said roughly eighty per cent of his time goes to engineering and design. That is a budget, not a boast: meetings without an output, reviews that only inform, and reporting that changes no decision are the default state of any organisation past a certain size, and they consume exactly the hours the product needed.
Cancel the standing meeting for a month and see what actually breaks. Usually the answer is the feeling of being informed.
The method does not tell you when you are wrong
Reasoning up from fundamentals is equally confident when the fundamentals are misjudged, and it removes the handrail that convention provides. That is the real cost of it: no external check, and a strong internal one. It belongs on the few questions worth that exposure.
The schedule derived from physics is right about what is possible and famously wrong about when. Both come from the same calculation.
How do I use it today?
Next time something is described as impossible or as simply costing what it costs, ask what physical law or published price actually sets the floor. Everything between that floor and today's number is somebody's decision, and decisions can be remade.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
Physics is the law. Everything else is a recommendation.
Try to be useful. Do things that are useful to other people.