Multi-Disciplinary Reading – Book Reviews

Started reading Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. The book is such a fun to read as it describes Elon Musk’s ambitious, controversial, visionary, determined and quirky nature through several examples. Since the book is quite long, I am planning to share notes of few chapters that I have gone through so far. One can pick this book and start from any chapter and you would like writer’s simple language to exemplify Elon’s traits.

Some notes –

• Musk founded Space X in 2002 as he had ultimate mission to establish human race in Mars and be able to make space faring trips possible for humans. While leading at Space X Elon Musk focused heavily on first principles thinking. Along these lines, he established following rules –
  • Question every cost
    • Space X needed a valve and the supplier quoted the price of $250K. Musk declared it insane and asked to make it inhouse. Another supplier quoted $120K for an actuator, Musk declared it to not be more complicated than garage door and asked his engineers to make in $5K.
    • Musk questioned every specification and requirement mandated by military and NASA to save costs. If someone brought up some military specification as requirement, Musk would say who wrote that why does it make sense. He said – All requirements should be treated as recommendations unless decreed by laws of physics.
  • Have maniacal sense of urgency
    • An engineer gave him some timeline to build engines at SpaceX, Musk asked it to cut it to half. Eventually they delivered the engines in half amount of time. Lot of times though they failed to meet such unrealistic deadlines given by Musk, but they would still beat all of their peers
  • Learn by failing
    • Musk liked approach of building testing failing and rebuilding as fast as possible. He would ask to focus on figuring out fix for problems fast rather than avoiding problems
  • Improvise
    • Once at SpaceX, one of the fuel tank got ripped due to lighting strike. Musk jumped on his plane to get 3 hr flight to oversee the fixing personally. He ordered engineers to fix them and said we cant throw them away. When engineers said there was no way to fix them, Musk in his fine leather boots and suit spent all night applying epoxy to cure the cracks and ruined his boots. Even though idea did not work out but it uplifted engineers to never bow down and be willing to take risks.
• Once NASA gave some space contract worth $227M to rival private company and when Musk got to know that NASA has given the contract to that company to save it from bankruptcy, he sued them saying NASA should be in business of promoting innovation not propping up companies. He won the project eventually.
• Boeing and Lockheed used to get fixed price contracts on cost plus basis from NASA and Defense department. Musk argued that it stymied innovation as there was little incentive for cost plus contractors to take risks and innovate. He said “Boeing and Lockheed just want their cost-plus gravy trains and want to suckle on the tit of government forever”
• Elon Musk brought together two separate teams working on electric car to build Tesla. Tesla was though company originally founded not by Musk but since he was the primary investor and alpha personality in the founding team, Musk finally got his way as CEO of the company few years down the line. Musk had several conflicts with Eberhard (the original founder of Tesla) on design decisions, costs of the car etc. Once he argued about seat size of the car and said his wife won’t be able to get in the car, then in separate instance he prevailed over the headlights design saying they are like eyes of the car and you have to have beautiful eyes.
• On SpaceX front, the team had to move away from mainland American launch site to some remote American island – Kwaj. SpaceX team used to fly from LA to Kwaj shipping components to remote site in Kwaj to become first private space company to successfully launch the rocket. Sometimes they used Musk jet to ship the components back and forth. SpaceX had 3 unsuccessful launch attempts due to different sets of failures. First two failures could be partially attributed to Musk’s cost cutting measures and his deliberate ignorance of few risks to speed up the launch process. But after 2 failures, Musk asked his team to go more by the specifications than before. 3 failures led to SpaceX in cash starved situation eventually before they succeeded in 2008
• Tesla was about to go bankrupt around 2007-08 as the company was burning cash and had delays in commercialization at scale. The company even used advance deposits of customers after prototyping the first car. All this led to divorce of Elon Musk and his wife categorically called out that Musk was emotionally distant in relationship and was only focused on his businesses. Finally several famous people in Silicon Valley wrote checks to invest in Tesla in 2008, even its own employees wrote checks for the same to salvage Tesla. Elon borrowed to cover his personal expenses as well. Daimler also invested $50M in 2008. All this led to Tesla being saved before they finally went to produce Model S at scale for the customers.
• While designing Model S, Tesla’s team was having difficulty figuring out the optimal location of battery pack underneath the car without making the car shape bulbuous and providing sufficient headroom. Musk made sure that car designing team and the car engineering team sit together so that designers can think like engineers and engineers can think like designers. This was unlike any normal car company where two departments used to be in different offices or different countries. This followed the principle of Steve Jobs that design is not just about aesthetics but true industrial design must connect the looks of the product to its engineering.

Many more such examples to follow in future notes…