How to Push Back on a Visionary CEO | Jon Mcneill

How did you say no to Elon or not now? To Elon? He's super rational. If he came up with an idea that he was convinced, pretty convinced on, then I would sit down with him and say, hey, look, let's steel man this thing together. One of those examples was actually cybertruck. He was in love with the idea of bending raw stainless steel and creating this video game caricature of a car. We had to sit down with him and say, look, if we do that, first of all, it's not a big market. Nobody buys trucks outside of North America because the streets are too small. And we're going to pour X amount of dollars into the project and come out with something less than X at the end. Like, this is not what we need to do right now. He mentioned in several earnings calls, like thanking the team for calling him off of that project, eventually they did it. But that was an example. Like, if you were rational with them, then he would and could sit down and explain the other side. And he was rational enough to say, maybe I ought to rethink that.