Elon Musk

Musk found Agrawal to be likable. “He’s a really nice guy,” he says. But that was the problem. If you ask Musk what are the traits needed in a CEO, he would not include “being a really nice guy.” One of his maxims is that managers should not aim to be liked.

When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard. Musk hired Dontchev on the spot.

Comradery is dangerous. It makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work. There is a tendency to not want to throw a colleague under the bus. That needs to be avoided.

Whenever there are problems to solve, don’t just meet with your managers. Do a skip level, where you meet with the level right below your managers.

“We had worked on many possible new features for years, but no one ever made decisions about them,” he said later. “Suddenly, we had this guy making rapid decisions.”

He had the mind of an engineer rather than a feel for human emotions. He could not understand why one or two deaths caused by Tesla Autopilot created an outcry when there were more than 1.3 million traffic deaths annually. Nobody was tallying the accidents prevented and lives saved by Autopilot. Nor were they assessing whether driving with Autopilo

His humor has many levels. The lowest is his puerile affection for poop emojis, fart sounds programmed into the Tesla, and other discharges of bathroom humor. Say the voice command “Open Butthole” to the console in a Tesla, and it opens the electric charging port at the rear of the vehicle.

The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.

When I asked Gates why he had shorted Tesla, he explained that he had calculated that the supply of electric cars would get ahead of demand, causing prices to fall. I nodded but still had the same question: Why had he shorted the stock? Gates looked at me as if I had not understood what he just explained and then replied as if the answer was obviou