Author Eric Jorgenson discusses Elon Musk's decision to split his remaining $30M between Tesla and SpaceX during the 2008 financial crisis.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Jorgenson: Tesla and SpaceX are becoming the biggest companies on Earth
“To do both of these, like, generation-defining, singular companies that were on nobody's radar, that are now, I think, on the way to being the biggest companies on Earth.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jorgenson: Musk solved a months-long Starship bottleneck in an overnight surge
“They'd spent months trying to, like, weld a dome for Starship that fit over the, this, like stainless steel cone that was gonna go over the top of the rocket, and they hadn't gotten it done for months, and he just showed up at the site, was like, we're gonna h…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jorgenson: Musk escalates status updates to hourly 24/7 emails during bottlenecks
“The status updates escalate with how serious the bottleneck is. So weekly cadence for, you know, maybe a normal bottleneck. It'll go to daily, like a daily, 24 hour sync on whatever the bottleneck is to run the algorithm on it. For one week, one guy, I don't k…”
Insight
Jorgenson: 99.9% of organizations err on firing employees too slowly
“And what I realized is like erring on the side of firing too quickly is actually so rare. And so we have such like an emotional reaction to it. Oh, it's unfair, but actually 99.9% of organizations on the planet are erring on the side of firing too slowly.”
Insight
Jorgenson: Musk dictates you must remove enough to add 10% back
“He says, if you're not adding back 10% of what you removed, you're not removing enough.”
What-if
Jorgenson: Electric cars at scale would not exist without Elon Musk
“Social networks would have happened without Zuckerberg. Search engines would have happened without Larry and Sergey. Pick your thing. We would have had operating systems without Bill Gates. We would have computers without jobs. It's not clear that we would hav…”