Private Elon Musk Emails

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. As I've mentioned, with the new and improved Founders Journal, I'm going to act as your startup Sherpa, curating the best content for entrepreneurs in the world, summarizing it so you don't have to read it yourself, and analyzing it so you have actionable takeaways to apply to your business. For today's episode, I'm going to be reading 3 emails from Elon Musk. These emails were initially just for Tesla employees' eyes, but were eventually made public. I am not sure how they were made public. I think these emails not only give good insight into the way in which Elon operates as a person and operates his businesses, but I also think there are great lessons hidden within each of these emails, regardless of what you think of Elon as a person. So let's dive in. Okay, so this first email was sent from Elon to everyone at Tesla in October of 2021. The funny part about this is the email I'm about to read came a day after a different email in which Elon told employees that it was okay for them to listen to music at the factory to make work more enjoyable. And so the October 4th email, the second one, which I'll read now, was a bit more serious. It goes from Elon Musk, date Monday, October 4th, 2021, to everybody. Subject: Please note. The body of the email reads: If an email is sent from me with explicit directions, there are only 3 actions allowed by managers. 1, email me back to explain why what I said was incorrect. Sometimes I'm just plain wrong! Exclamation point. 2, request further clarification if what I said was ambiguous. And 3, execute the directions. If none of the above are done, that manager will be asked to to resign immediately. Thank you, Elon. This is hilarious. So most people will look at or listen to this email and be like, man, this guy is a dick. But— and this may ruffle some feathers— I honestly love it. If you are going to work at Tesla, at Twitter, at SpaceX, or at Neuralink, you know what you're signing up for. On one hand, you're going to deal with a man that doesn't do small talk or social norms or sugarcoating. But on the other hand, you will be pushed really hard and work with really smart people. I also love this because the best leaders create 100% clarity for their team. Where there are question marks or unclear communication, you get slower progress, you get frustration, and you get finger-pointing in your company. With this email I just read, you get none of that. Elon tells you to do something and you have 3 options: agree with Elon and do it, disagree with Elon and tell him he is wrong. Now, I do have a question about if he's actually creating a psychologically safe environment where there's a culture in which people feel comfortable to push back on ideas. But for right now, let's assume That's a yes. And the third option is you ask for clarification, and then after that you agree or disagree with Elon. What this ultimately means is a task will get done in the way Elon has said, or it will get done in an agreed-upon way if the person has pushed back. But in any scenario, setting this expectation means that if something doesn't get done, the person does not keep their job. Now, let me caveat this. Do I think Elon could phrase his emails in a way that is a bit kinder and a bit more empathetic? Sure, they absolutely can be. But I've also learned we are all wired in a certain way, and sometimes it is unrealistic to get the visionary leader who gets you to think bigger and work harder than you've ever imagined without the brashness and bluntness that shows no emotional regard for anything other than the ultimate mission. Something I also like about the constraints that Elon sets here is that it avoids something that I will call deadline creep. Think about how often as a manager you ask for something to get done, let's say a week from now, and a week turns into 2 weeks, which turns into 3 weeks, which turns into somehow 2 months. And then you're left asking yourself, how did that happen? How it happened is it always seemed like there was a good reason that a deadline was getting pushed and the delay never seemed that significant. But when the goalposts keep moving, all of a sudden a lot of little excuses turn into a huge headache. Elon's method here, although devoid of empathy, is a great way to keep the goalposts from moving. Now, moving on to the second email. This next one was sent by Elon to Tesla employees in May of 2022, as a lot of big tech companies were trying to be as accommodating to employees' work desires during what was the Great Resignation, where there was a mass exodus of talent. Elon took a very different stance from most companies. So let me read the email from Elon Musk. Subject: To be super clear. Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week. Moreover, the office must be where your actual colleagues are located, not some remote pseudo office. If you don't show up, we will assume you have resigned. He loves talking about resignation in his emails. The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence. That is why I lived in the factory so much, so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, Tesla would long ago have gone bankrupt. There are, of course, companies that don't require this. But when was the last time they shipped a great new product? It's been a while. Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth. This will not happen by phoning it in. Thanks, Elon. Okay, so let's break this down. There are 2 core beliefs that Elon is sharing through his email that I want to talk about. The first is his view of remote versus in-person work. The second is his view of how leaders should behave. Let's talk about remote versus in-person work. Elon is not the first person to say that remote work is not the format in which you build great companies or great things. Keith Rabois, who is a VC by day and a Barry's Bootcamp instructor by night, and he's part of the PayPal Mafia— Keith is super outspoken about remote work. Here's what he says.

Do you not believe in remote work? I don't believe in remote work for startups. I would not fund a company. Founders Club would probably not fund a company collectively that's based on remote work. And why is that? Well, I think if you've ever built a company, I don't actually— I don't know anybody who's ever built a company successfully who believes in remote work, first of all. The reason why is another Peterism is you basically have to build a company on undiscovered talent. People early in their career that large companies, think Google, Facebook, whatever, they don't know how to process these people. Because you don't want to compete on the basis of cost. You need to find people that they're not going to want to attract, and they need a little company. When people are early in their career or people are early in their craft in any career, they learn by osmosis. The way you learn by osmosis is you need to be shadowing people for unstructured learning. If you take away the unstructured learning, people cannot advance beyond the wisdom of their years. Secondly, you need to know who to promote. The way you figure out who to promote and give them opportunities by watching very soft, subtle cues that don't pop up on a Zoom call. So you need to have— you can't build a company with undiscovered talent and give people internal promotion opportunities if you're using any version of remote work.

Similar to Rabois, Musk does not believe you can build great companies remote. He thinks that a remote org is both bad for productivity and morally wrong, citing that if the person making your food or building your car or delivering your package can't work from home, why should you be able to? Now, I don't know if I agree that remote work is a moral issue, but I do believe that companies are less productive when they work remotely. Not only do I think that there's knowledge sharing and serendipity that would never happen in a remote setting, but I also think for the majority of people, they are more productive in an office because there are fewer distractions and being surrounded by people working, which makes you work more. Now let's talk about the second point. The second point that Elon makes in this email is about how leaders should act, and I am fully on board with him here. He says, and I quote, the more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence. That is why I lived in the factory so much. So that those on the line could see me working alongside them. Whatever standard you want to set for your people, you should be setting as high, if not higher, of a standard for yourself as a leader. Why? Because more important than words, actions by leaders are the things that employees actually copy in a business. If you work extremely hard, your people will work extremely hard, and it will be congruous to demand a relentless work ethic of your people. If you demand a relentless work ethic of your people, but you leave every day by 5:00, you can expect 2 things to happen. People will copy your actions versus your words, meaning people won't work really hard. They'll work till 5:05. Right after you've left the office, they'll leave, or people will feel resentful because there's a difference between what you say and what you actually do. Now let's talk about the final email. This 3rd email is from May of 2023, and it gives window into how closely Elon likes to be to Tesla's hiring process. So the email goes to everybody from Elon Musk, subject hiring, date May 15th, 2023. And the body says, I would like to gain a better understanding of our hiring. VPs should send me a list of their department hiring requests once a week. Think carefully before sending me a request. No one can join Tesla, even as a contractor, until you receive my email approval. Thanks, Elon. It's funny, he signs off every email the same exact way. Thanks, Elon. So this email was sent in May to the entire employee base at Tesla. And for context, Tesla grew by 30,000 employees to 130,000 total in the year of 2022. So this was sent in May of 2023. In all of 2022, the company grew from 100,000 employees to 130,000 employees. What's even crazier is I took a look at Tesla's new hires since May of 2023 when he sent the email, and roughly 3,000 new people started at the company per month. I would be shocked and honestly impressed if Elon actually signed off on every single hire since he sent that email. That means we're talking about roughly 25,000 new people that he had to sign off on. But outside of Elon, there's a bigger point I want to talk about here, which is how involved should a CEO be in hiring new people, and for how long should they be involved in that process? My personal view is a CEO should stay involved in hiring and specifically interviewing as long as humanly possible. I think it is one of the best ways to maintain the culture of your business beyond leaders demonstrating their behaviors that they want from the rest of the employee base. No one will better filter for culture than the founder or CEO of a company. Of course, in times where you need to have a close watch on expenses, this practice of being very involved in hiring and interviewing is also the best way to be extremely disciplined about adding headcount costs. And some people think when I posted this email online, some people think that Elon is using this email as a hack to have managers make smart decisions simply by him saying that he'll review each request and that all VPs should think carefully before sending a request will ultimately make people smarter about who they want to hire, even if Elon doesn't look at it. So I think there's kind of 2 paths to why CEOs and founders should stay involved in the hiring process. One path is being the best arbiter of culture in your company. And the closer you are to hiring, the better you will be able to maintain a culture as you scale. The second, which is probably the reason Elon sent this, is for cost control and people being thoughtful about spending more on behalf of the business by having to be thoughtful because they're going to ultimately have to request Elon's sign-off before they hire the person. So those are 3 of just a handful of formerly private internal emails from Elon that have been made public in the last few years. I think it gives good insight into how he runs his companies. And even if he is deficient in certain ways as a CEO, there are some really valuable lessons that any entrepreneur can take from the man. As always, thank you so much for listening to Founders Journal, and I'll catch you next episode.