How Elon Musk Used Unconditional Thinking to Rescue Tesla
“If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible, then unconventional thinking is necessary.”
- Elon Musk
There is, dare I say, almost no person on earth who hasn’t heard of Elon Musk. Over the years my opinions of him have varied from eccentric Silicon Valley entrepreneur to idealist—a meme fanatic, seemingly hellbent on directing any attention, good or bad, his way. Away in Crete this week I picked up his biography by Walter Isaacson and being honest, I haven’t been able to put it down.
I’ve seen and heard snippets of Elon’s grandeur, fanaticism and unmanageable work ethic across all social and normal media streams, but reading his biography encapsulates everything good and bad about him in the most readable and enjoyable way.
This is my first book by the famed biographer Isaacson, and he is unrelenting. Whether this is because Musk is the recipient or because of his style, I feel I’ve had a front-row seat to Elon Musk since the 1990s. I’m exhausted just reading it!
Elon Musk is undoubtedly a different kind of person to most of us. He’s a driver of innovation. Boarding on science fiction at times he manages to conjure up the impossible with the uttermost aloofness and expectance. Only halfway through I’m adamant in my conclusion. The world would not progress without people like Elon Musk (at least not as quickly).
In 2018, the Tesla stock had been the target of aggressive short-sellers on Wall Street much to the annoyance of Musk. Short-selling for those who don’t know is as follows; when a person buys a stock, say Tesla for $100 and the stock goes up to say $200 you double your initial investment (at least for now). Short selling works the opposite way. You want the Tesla stock to decline as much as possible for you to make money. Short sellers don’t often get Christmas cards.
Part of Tesla being targeted was because of Musk’s mental instability at the time and his uncontrollable urge to over-egg almost everything that came out of his mouth.
The Tesla factories weren’t producing enough new cars per week, and Musk's deadline at the end of June was fast approaching. Musk and his team had done seemingly everything, and more, to squeeze as many cars as possible out of the factories, and conventional thinking may have led you to conclude that it may be time to go into damage limitation mode to try and protect what was left of Tesla.
There was one problem with that though. Elon Musk doesn’t do conventional thinking.
“Musk likes military history, especially the tales of warplane development. At a meeting at the Fremont factory on May 22, he recounted a story about World War II. When the government needed to rush the making of bombers, it set up production lines in the parking lots of the aerospace companies in California. He discussed the idea with Jerome Guillen, whom he would soon promote to being Tesla's president of automotive, and they decided that they could do something similar.
There was a provision in the Fremont zoning code for something called “a temporary vehicle repair facility.” It was intended to allow gas stations to set up tents where they could change tires or mufflers. But the regulations did not specify a maximum size. “Get one of those permits and start building a huge tent,” he told Guillen. “We'll have to pay a fine later.”
That afternoon, Tesla workers began clearing away the rubble that covered an old parking lot behind the factory. There was not time to pave over the cracked concrete, so they simply paved a long strip and began erecting a tent around it. One of Musk's ace facilities builders, Rodney Westmoreland, flew in to coordinate the construction, and Teller rounded up some ice-cream trucks to hand out treats to those working in the hot sun. In two weeks, they were able to complete a tented facility that was 1,000 feet long and 150 feet wide, big enough to accommodate a makeshift assembly line. Instead of robots, there were humans at each station.
One problem was that they did not have a conveyor belt to move the unfinished cars through the tent. All they had was an old system for moving parts, but it was not powerful enough to move car bodies. “So we put it on a slight slope, and gravity meant it had enough power to move the cars at the right speed,” Musk says.
At just after 4 p.m. on June 16, just three weeks after Musk came up with the idea, the new assembly line was rolling Model 3 sedans out of the makeshift tent. Neal Boudette of the New York Times had come to Fremont to report on Musk in action, and he was able to see the tent going up in the parking lot. “If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible,” Musk told him, “then unconventional thinking is necessary.”
- Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk
Elon Musk built the first private rocket company to go into orbit, made rockets reusable and sent NASA astronauts into space. He did that in less than 2 decades. He went from trying to buy old rockets from seedy Russians who (literally) spat in his face and laughed at him to reverse engineering every single component that goes into making a rocket. He made what he calls the ‘idiot index’, buying all the materials himself, retrofitting parts from other industries such as the automotive industry and all this ON TOP of running Tesla, Starlink, The Boring Company, Solarcity, having 10 kids and oh, buying and getting into trouble on X (Twitter).
It’s hard to think of takeaways that one could realistically take away from reading about such a person. He often comes across as part messiah part otherworldly being. It’s hard to say that from looking back at what he’s achieved in his life (still early fifties) he’s not!
From that one example, and there are many more in the book, conventional thinking will only get you so far in life. He detested ‘flabby’ defence contractors of yesteryear with their bureaucracy, lack of appetite for risk or innovation, and over-the-top legal restraints. They were everything he was not. It remains to be seen in the years ahead that around the corner, there isn’t something that could shatter the Musk Illusion, but if I were a betting man, I wouldn’t take that bet.
The book is littered with examples of this type of thinking, and I will be writing a post in the next few weeks regarding my best takeaways from the book.
You don’t have to be on a mission to ‘save humanity’ or decarbonise an entire industry to understand that conventional thinking or ‘out of the box’ thinking is what at times can be the difference between something being good to something extraordinary.
They’ll be many times when conventional thinking is the right way to go about making decisions but now and again you have to just throw caution to the wind and say ‘fuck it’ let’s try this crazy idea.
When reading this passage, I was reminded of Ernest Shackleton’s desperate bid for survival almost a hundred years earlier. His nickname was ‘Old Cautious’. Meticulous, he ensured all of his shipwrecked crew survived living on ice floes in the Antarctic for over 500 days. You can read the summary I did here for the incredible book Endurance by Alfred Lansing.
Upon reaching Georgia Island, Shackleton and two other men scrambled over previously unpassed mountains, racing against the sun to ensure they did not freeze to death atop the mountain peaks. They hit an impasse when Shackleton said something seemingly insane:
“There was no need to explain the situation. Speaking rapidly, Shackleton said simply that they faced a clear-cut choice: If they stayed where they were, they would freeze - in an hour, maybe two, maybe more. They had to get lower - and with all possible haste.
So he suggested they slide.
Worsley and Crean were stunned especially for such an insane solution to be coming from Shackleton. But he wasn't joking... he wasn't even smiling. He meant it - and they knew it.”
- Alfred Lansing, Endurance
Shackleton suggested to his men, who were just miles and hours away from safety after being shipwrecked in sub-zero temperatures for a year and a half, that they throw themselves off a snow-capped mountain, pray that they survive, let alone are fit enough to carry on and ensure the rest of the crew also get rescued.
If that’s not unconventional thinking then I don’t know what is.
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