Biography Edition (Elon Musk): Lessons from the Visionary's Life and Leadership

Elon Musk's leadership style may not mesh with everyone, but his passionate pursuit of transformative vision, combined with his intense work ethic, work ethic, and confidence in his convictions, has undeniably shaped the culture and trajectory of his ventures. His approach is characterized by a strong insistence on adherence to quality and an iterative process of improvement, all aimed at achieving objectives that many would seem impossible. It is the mix of incision, technical acumen, decisive action, and relentless pursuit of lofty goals that has become emblematic of Elon Musk's leadership. I read the biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. Really interesting read. I learned a lot about Elon Musk and his approach to having a hardcore culture in his businesses. Being decisive, iterating over problems, and executing, and also reading to lead. So let's get started into some of the notes that I have here. Elon Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. Some of the excerpts here out of his childhood from the book: Reading remained Musk's psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night. 9 hours at a stretch. So Elon Musk, during his childhood, he was always reading. He even said at one point that he read all the encyclopedias that his parents had because he just ran out of things to read, so he was just reading the encyclopedia. So he's always consuming books throughout his childhood. So one of the other quotes here is, physics could teach anything— physics could teach everything about the universe except why. That led to what he calls his adolescent existential, existential crisis. I began trying to figure out what the meaning of life and the universe was, he said, and I got really depressed about it, like maybe life had no meaning. So this is a period in time when Elon Musk gets really depressed in his early childhood about— because he's reading philosophers like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and he's kind of getting depressed about what they're saying. Then he reads this book The Hitchhiker's Guide, and that kind of— it's like a kind of like a comedy book, but it has a lot of philosophical ideas in it as well, and that kind of makes him feel a little bit better. And he really loves that book, The Hitchhiker's Guide, and it also kind of broadens his mind, I think, a little bit to space exploration, which obviously becomes a theme later on in his life. Here's another quote from the book. Musk would later talk about, even joke about, having Asperger's, a common name for a form of autism spectrum disorder that can affect a person's social skills, relationships, emotional connectivity, and self-regulation. He was never actually diagnosed as a kid, his mother says, but he says he has Asperger's, and I'm sure he's right. The condition was exacerbated by his childhood traumas. Whenever he would later feel bullied or threatened. His close friend Antonio Gracias said the PTSD from his childhood would hijack his limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotional responses. As a result, he was bad at picking up social cues. I took literally— I took people literally when they would say something, he says, and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant. He had a preference for things that were more precise, such as engineering, physics, and coding. And then even a point in time, his teachers when he was really young actually thought that Elon was retarded. That's what they told his parents, like, hey, we think your kid is retarded. So Elon definitely apparently has Asperger's. And you can kind of see in his leadership style, he doesn't, he doesn't have a filter when it comes to trying to make people feel good about themselves in some situations, especially when it comes to the product of design, engineering of things. And he reminds me of Steve Jobs, who, you know, will berate someone basically for not executing. His vision, which we'll get to later. So in 1988, he graduates from, uh, high school and moves to Canada. And then 1992, transfers over to Pennsylvania where he starts going to school for his bachelor's degree. And he— and then 1995, he ends up dropping out of Stanford University PhD program after only 2 days to pursue his entrepreneurial aspirations in the areas of the internet, renewable energy, and outer space. So, uh, there's a quote from the book here. It says Elon Musk says most PhDs are irrelevant. The number that actually moved the needle is almost none. And, and I watched an interview that Elon Musk did with Kevin Rose, I think it is, on the SpaceX floor, and Kevin Rose asked Elon Musk, like, what— how did you learn to be an entrepreneur? Like, he, you know, obviously Elon Musk has run several, many different businesses. He's like, how did you learn this? Did you learn this in school, or what did you learn this? He's like, no, I just learned this from biographies, reading biographies. He cited Benjamin Franklin's biography, Steve Jobs, Tesla, Einstein, and different interviews. So he was definitely a big reader of biographies, and that just makes me feel like we're on track. You know, we're— you and I are interested in the folks that are successful. We're reading their biographies and their autobiographies and getting those insights. Elon Musk was doing this. We've also seen Jeff Bezos has done this. Jeff Bezos, as we covered in a previous episode, he was reading Sam Walton's autobiography and picked out a lot of ideas out of Sam Walton's autobiography. Napoleon, all through his childhood, he was reading biographies of, uh, of Charlemagne, Alexander the Great, understanding their, their strategies and tactics and warfare. And so this is, this is the right path. It seems like just again and again we see this over and over again that the folks that are making an impact in the world are learning from the folks that came before them. So in 1995, Elon Musk co— uh, co-founds Zip2 with his brother. And this is a company that provides business directories for newspapers. It's basically kind of like Google Maps, sort of early version of that. And this is 1995, so the internet was like just coming out. And at this point, you know, he had a huge amount of debt from school. He had He had no money, so he was basically negative equity on his personal balance sheet. He didn't— he had an office, but he didn't have an apartment. He could only afford one, so he basically rented an office. He showered at the YMCA down the street because he couldn't afford an apartment. He just slept on a mattress, like, in his office. And so he's developing, doing all this coding to develop this Zip2 software, and there's only a few people working, you know, him and his brother, I think one other person, and then they had a few salespeople on commission that were going out and trying to sell this to newspapers and media companies. And so they ended up getting traction. One of the things that Elon Musk said that he learned during the startup phase was that success wasn't just about dreaming up the right ideas as much as it is about discovering and then rapidly discarding the wrong ones. So he— this is a theme that we'll see over and over again with Elon Musk, is iterating through things, not doing a lot of planning or analyzing. It's just action. He's really action bias. And so here's a quote: You start off with an idea, and that idea is mostly wrong, and then you adapt that idea and keep refining it and you listen to criticism and then engage in sort of a recursive self-improvement. Keep iterating on a loop that says, am I doing something useful for other people? Because that's what a company is supposed to do. So that's a really good quote. You know, basically when you're developing your business, improving it, ask yourself that question. Am I doing something useful for people? Because that's what a company, the whole purpose of it, that's what it's supposed to be doing. Zip2 ends up getting traction and growing it pretty, pretty well, and they ended up selling it. So they sell it in 1999 to Compaq. Compaq acquires Zip2 for $307 million, and Musk receives $22 million for his 7% share in the company. And Elon Musk wanted to be the CEO of Zip2, but he basically ended up getting ousted and not able to actually lead the company. He was sort of young at the time and perceived as not, you know, mature enough to lead that company. So they put, you know, experienced executives to run the company. But what we see at Zip2 is Musk's leadership was characterized by impatience, having a challenging work culture. He had very high expectations of the folks that worked with him, and he had a tendency to dive directly into solving problems. Like, he was all about solving problems, be on the ground floor. And understanding the technical pieces of everything. So shortly after, in 1999, after Compaq purchased Zip2, Musk co-founds X.com, an online payment company. You guys are probably like, hey, that sounds familiar, co-founding X.com, that sounds familiar. Obviously now Twitter has changed to X.com, and so this is actually an idea from back in 1999 that Elon Musk started back then. That was new to me. I didn't realize that Elon Musk had actually already had a company called X.com, and him buying Twitter is actually connected to that. So we'll get to that later. In 1999, he wanted to disrupt the financial industry. He— something he realized in college was that the financial industry was very archaic. They were ripe for disruption. They weren't embracing the internet in any kind of way, and he realized that most money in the world was not physical cash, it was basically ledger— digital ledgers at a banking system. So he wanted to create an online money transfer company, and so that's what he did with X.com. And this X.com and another company that was started by Peter Thiel, it was PayPal, and the two of these companies ended up being competitors. Now initially, both these companies, especially X.com X.com had to go through a lot of legal requirements to be able to transact online with, with, uh, with money. So they got through all those legal requirements, and, uh, one of the— this— during this time at X.com, Elon Musk also kind of identified this, this issue of designing and creating something needs to be a closely knit team. So here's a quote from the book: separating the design of a product from it, from its engineering, was a recipe for dysfunction. Designers have had to feel the immediate pain if something they designed was hard to engineer. If your hand is on a stove and it gets hot, you pull it right off. But if someone else's hand is on the stove, it will take you longer to do something. And so he just identified, like, when you have a designing team and a production team and they are not working together, together well, you're gonna be slower to iterate problem solving. And so this could be a lesson that we look at our, in our companies. Is there some component in our business where one person's doing something that's related to another thing? And if there's not a good communication or a good process in place between those two actions, is it gonna slow down our responsiveness in our business? So maybe it's sales and production. If you don't have a good handoff process, uh, between the sales per person and the production manager, you might have a lot of friction points. So trying to figure out how, how can we structure things to make our businesses responsive and thrive. So X.com and PayPal were basically competing against each other. They're doing a lot of price cuts trying to get the network effect, get the most amount of customers. And because of that race towards getting that network effect, having the most customers and winning, both of them were, were basically losing money. So they decided to do— to combine X.com and PayPal and do a business combination. And they did that, and Elon Musk ends up becoming the CEO of of the— basically PayPal. They took the name PayPal after that, and he's also the largest shareholder. And so he's leading the company, and there's a lot of tension between Elon Musk and the CEOs. And here's a quote from the book: Listen, only the arrogant are self-confident enough to push their creative ideas to others, Elon said. Steve Jobs believed that he was right. He was always right. And he was willing to push harder and longer than other people who might have had equally good ideas but who caved under the pressure. So here we can see that Elon Musk basically embracing Steve Jobs' style of leadership, where he has a vision in place and he is pushing everybody to get to that vision. And he's— unless you convince him with data that he's wrong, he's going to pursue that. That vision to any end. And so this rubs people wrong in PayPal. Basically, there's a coup when Elon is on his honeymoon. When he goes on his honeymoon, he hadn't taken off any days off, but he finally took a day off, a few days off, and went on his honeymoon. And there was a coup. They basically voted Elon Musk out as the CEO. And the folks that were on Elon Musk's side, they came to Elon like, hey, we can fight this, you know, we can try to get you back in as a CEO. And he, he said no, uh, let's, let's just go ahead and let it be. And, uh, he didn't want to basically destroy PayPal with the internal fighting. So he had a strong emotional connection, and he actually compared PayPal to harming his own child. Like, if he was gonna try to fight the, the coup that happened. And then, and then in 2002, PayPal is acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, which Elon Musk receives $165 million of that. And so here's a quote from the book: for the second time in 3 years, Musk had been pushed out of a company. He was a visionary who didn't play well with others. And, and again, this is very— it keeps reminding me of Steve Jobs. Like, he He can push people to do impossible things, but, you know, in these first couple of companies, he's not able to really stay in power long enough to get what he wants fully. He ends up getting kicked out. Here's another quote from the book. Musk says, after I got assassinated by the PayPal coup leaders, like Caesar being stabbed in the Senate, I could have said, you guys, you suck. But I didn't. If I'd done that, Founders Fund wouldn't have come through in 2008 and SpaceX would be dead. I'm not into astrology, but karma may be real. So basically, he didn't burn bridges when he got kicked out of PayPal. He maintained a friendship with Peter Thiel, who had the Founders Fund, and later would help him out when he needed help at SpaceX. So in 2002, after the sale of PayPal, Elon Musk immediately starts going into his next venture here, and he's wanting to start SpaceX. He basically wants— the goal being he wants to reduce space transportation costs so that he can colonize Mars. And here's a quote from the book: He went to Palo Alto Public Library to read about rocket engineering and started calling experts asking to borrow their old engine manuals. Goals. At a gathering of PayPal alumni in Las Vegas, he sat in a cabana by the pool reading a tattered manual of a Russian rocket engine. One of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next. Musk answered, "I'm going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multi-planetary civilization." Woolway's reaction was unsurprising: "Dude, you're bananas." So just coming out of PayPal, now he's refocused. Okay, now my next goal is to colonize Mars. And this is kind of going back to The Hitchhiker's Guide. He's had an interest in physics and space exploration throughout his life so far, and he, he kind of identified this early as something he wanted to do. He just didn't have the ability to really get into this. But now that he's done Zip2 got a multimillionaire coming out of that. And then now PayPal has sold, he made another $100+ million. Now he has the actual ability to go after this goal. So now he is all in with SpaceX. Here's another quote from the book: "This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risk." And this quote was in reference to basically how we were landing on the moon and doing a lot of space exploration with NASA decades ago, but we haven't really made much progress. Um, and this, when he said this, you know, it was early 2000s. And so he wanted, he wanted to keep pushing that improvement, take it, take it, get us back in the space exploration game. One of the other quotes from the book is, if you were negative or thought some, something couldn't be done, you were not invited to the next meeting. Müller recalls. He just wanted people who would make things happen. And so this is the— when he starts SpaceX, he's very action-biased. He has a bias for action. He's not really into planning too much. He wants to just execute. Uh, here's another quote from the SpaceX president, Shotwell. Shotwell wrote a plan of action for sales. Musk took one look at it and told him that he did not care about plans. 'Just get on with the job.' I was like, 'Oh, okay, this is refreshing. I don't have to write a plan,' Shotwell recalled. Here was her first real taste of Musk's management style. Don't talk about doing things, just do things. Here's another quote: 'Elon is brilliant. He's involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to give him a gut reaction. He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics.' One thing he understands really well is the physics of rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. He can get into discussions about flying a satellite and whether he can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve these equations in real time. It's amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years. I don't want to be the, the person who ever has to compete with Elon. You might as well leave the business and find something else fun to do. He will outmaneuver you, outthink you, and out-execute you. So Elon Musk starts SpaceX in 2002, and he's pulling the team together and going through this iterative process of trying to build and launch a rocket. And so there's a lot of failures in that, in that time period. In early SpaceX, they spent a lot of money and they were he— Elon Musk was putting all his money into SpaceX, and they were just failing over and over and over again. But they were failing quickly. And basically, uh, Elon's thought was like, if we fail, keep iterating and failing quickly, we'll identify what works, and then we'll get something that actually works up into the sky, as you know, in the form of a rocket that won't explode. But there was many rocket explosions, uh, But then to transition really quick to 2004, this is when he joins Tesla Incorporated, then called Tesla Motors, as the chairman of the board and later becomes the CEO of and product architect. And in Tesla, he kind of uses some of the things that he's learning at SpaceX and translates them over into Tesla. And he comes up with it, what he calls the algorithm of how to, how to basically think through problems. So here's the algorithm, which is a quote from the book. So number 1, question every, every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department such as the legal department or the, or the safety department. You need to know the real name of the person who made that requirement, then you should question it. No matter how smart that person is, requirements from people are the most dangerous because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb. So the reason why this was such a number one, you know, going through SpaceX building rockets, there's a lot of legal requirements and things handed over from, you know, because they're using like NASA, uh, kind of protocols and stuff like that. So they're like going through these line by line and trying to understand, is this actually needed or is this like an excessive safety protocol that's not really needed or safety requirement? And so there he's having— he kind of learned this and passed this over to Tesla as well. Uh, you know, is this a requirement that we actually need to adopt for our process or is this just kind of something that came up that we can get rid of and delete. And this goes into the second item. So step number 1, identify requirements. Step number 2, delete any part of the process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding them back, at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough. So he's all about getting rid of excessive steps in your process. And if you haven't, you basically saying like, if you didn't delete enough of your process, if you had, unless you had to go back and add some, some of the process back. So basically streamlining your process. And then, so that's number 2. Number 3 is simplify and optimize. This should come up after step 2. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part of a process that should not exist. So that's why you're doing the step 2 first, you're deleting out stupid, basically stupid steps or not needed steps of your process. And then once you've deleted those steps out, then you can simplify it and optimize it. Step number 4 is accelerate cycle time. Every process should be speeded up, but only do this after you have followed the first 3 steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. So again, he's emphasizing you can delete more steps than what you realize. And so you don't want to, um, try to accelerate your process unless you've already evaluated your process for any steps that can be deleted. Step number 5 is automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and then the bugs were shaken out. So you want to delete, simplify, streamline, optimize, accelerate, and then automate. Step number 5. Step 1 should be question the requirements, he says. Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete. The only rules that are the ones dictated by the, the laws of physics. Everything else is just a recommendation. So that is his algorithm that he used at SpaceX and also Tesla that he refined during those years. Uh, 2006, Elon co-founds SolarCity, which is a solar energy service company and a current subsidiary of Tesla Incorporated. So here's a quote from the book: Musk became increasingly frustrated with the company's practices, especially the way it relied on aggressive sales that was compensated by commissions. Their sales tactics became like those schemes that go door-to-door selling you boxes of knives or something, Elon Musk said. His instincts, his instincts had always been just the opposite. He never put much effort into sales and marketing, instead believed that if you made a great product, the sales would follow. This is again reminds me of Steve Jobs, where Steve Jobs was very product focused, not much. He was also great at communicating, but not— there wasn't a focus on sales necessarily. Word of mouth is the best marketing, right? Seeing this mistake done myself, I've done it, but I've seen other companies do this, is where they have an overemphasis on sales and marketing when they're not really paying attention to production. And you can have the best sales and marketing, but if your production is not performing well and you have bad word of mouth, it doesn't matter how much sales and marketing you're gonna do, you're gonna have a really rough time. So, um, really overemphasizing— if you're gonna overemphasize something, you overemphasize your production process so that you're providing such an outstanding product that— or in service— that word of mouth is going to help you with that marketing piece. So that goes into, uh, 2008, SpaceX launches Falcon 1, the first privately developed liquid fuel launch vehicle to reach orbit. And so, you know, he started SpaceX in 2002. They don't actually launch a rocket until 2008, and in that time frame there's a lot of failures. So here's a quote from the book: Optimism, pessimism, whatever. Elon Musk answered, we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work. Here's another quote: Musk took an iterative approach to design. Rockets and engines would, would be quickly prototyped, tested, blown up, revised, and tried again until finally something worked. Move fast, blow things up, repeat. It's not how well you avoid problems, Mueller said. It's how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it. Again, Elon is not about planning or avoiding mistakes. He's about executing and then solving the problems Fixing the mistake and then repeat, rinse and repeat. Another quote from the book: the important thing with Elon, he says, is that if you told him the risks and showed him the engineering data, he would make a quick assessment and let the responsibility shift from your shoulders to his. Another quote: Musk has a rule about responsibility. Every part of the process, every specification needs to have a name attached. He can be quick to personalize blame when something goes wrong. Elon wants transparency on, on requirements and also responsibility, who owns what process. If you're familiar with Traction by Gino Wickman, this is what's recommended in that book as well, that you want to have every part of your process assigned to somebody and they're responsible for that. And so Elon Musk is very big on that. Every part, every process, every specification needs to have a name attached to it so that you can hold that person responsible if that part or process fails. And this reminds me of Rockefeller. One of— there's a point when Andrew Carnegie goes and asks Rockefeller, goes over his house and asks Rockefeller like, hey, how do you get your people to be so great? Basically some, some question to that effect. And Rockefeller basically said that he, he gives people responsibility and he doesn't punish them when they make a mistake, but he will punish punish them or get rid of them if they didn't neglect their responsibility. So he makes that distinction of, you know, because people make mistakes, but, um, as long as they didn't neglect their responsibility, they would still be on the team. So in 2010, SpaceX becomes the first privately funded company to launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft, Dragon. So this gets into the reusable rockets that basically to make space travel affordable Elon Musk realized that you had to make rockets reusable where you could shoot them up into space, have them orbit, and then come back down and use them again. And so he was able to accomplish that in 2010. And during this, this time, Elon is very much still in the weeds making things happen, helping solving problems. And one of the quotes from the book is, never ask your troops to do something you're not willing to do. This is also something I experienced in Being an officer in the military, that was always a big thing that was pushed on us, like, don't ever ask your troops to do something that you're not willing to do. So you're, you know, you're in the woods leading the squad, platoon, whatever you're doing. You're sleeping on the ground, you're in the thick of the bad weather, you're doing all the things that you're asking your team to do, and your team sees this. Or your, your platoon or your, or whoever you're with, they see you doing the same things that you're asking them to do. And that kind of inspires your team to, to follow you. And so Elon Musk does this. He like sleeps on the floor of the SpaceX or Tesla production room. He is there with the team to get things done, to push them. Then we have several other dates here. So 2012 SpaceX Dragons. A spacecraft docks with the International Space Station, the first for a private enterprise. Then 2015, Elon Musk co-founds OpenAI, a nonprofit research company that promotes friendly artificial intelligence. 2016, he co-founds Neuralink, a company that focuses on developing brain-computer interfaces. 2016, he also co-founds The Boring Company, which is a infrastructure and tunnel construction company. And then 2018, he launches the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of 2. And then 2020, SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission becomes the first manned flight to the ISS launched from the United States since the space shuttle program ended in 2011. And so that gets us to the Twitter purchase in 2022. And so in 2022, Elon Musk— it was a very public thing that happened on Twitter where basically Elon Musk was thinking about purchasing Twitter. Elon Musk is a heavy user of Twitter, now called X, and he felt that there was a lot of— this is after COVID, and so there was a lot of censorship going on online that he felt that should not be the case. And he also, like we had talked about before, he had X.com and he didn't quite— he wasn't able to fully realize his vision with X.com because he got ousted. He actually wanted to make X.com not just a payment provider or facilitator. He also wanted to basically have a social media component to X.com with payments as well. So he had a bigger vision for X.com. PayPal ended up going just narrowly focused on financial transfers and things of that nature, but he actually wanted to kind of have a bigger idea with that. So he thought, uh, that was another reason why he was interested in purchasing Twitter. And here's a quote from the book: That's what Twitter could become, he said, if you can combine a social network with a payments platform you could, you could create what I wanted X.com to be. And so he ends up purchasing Twitter after a lot of drama. And, uh, so he gets in there and he ends up firing 75% of Twitter employees. And when he came into Twitter, the culture was like a 180-degree difference from what he had, the culture he created at Tesla and SpaceX. And the companies that he's run. Because the companies that he has run are very— have what he calls a hardcore culture, where they're very action-oriented, focused on getting things done. Um, he would have these certain, uh, events at Tesla or SpaceX where he would just create a ridiculous goal, like, hey, we need to get all the the rocket launch by tomorrow at noon, and he would get everybody in the company in on that goal, and they would be working all hours of the night to, to meet whatever, you know, thing that he basically— whatever goal he, he put out there. And it was just like a forcing mechanism to get people to surge in on a certain mission regardless of whatever else was going on in their lives or whatever else was going on in the company. And he did this frequently on each company, whereas Twitter was a very soft culture. You know, you go to the campus, you can— you don't have to work there, you don't have to be there in person, you can work from home. You, if you do work at Twitter, you can stop by their little internal coffee shop. They got beanbags, you can hang around, you know, chat with people. Very kind of soft culture and not very focused on the mission and actually producing work. So a completely different culture than what Musk had developed at SpaceX and Tesla. And so he's coming in and he needs to completely just 180 the culture. And he also has to— he felt that Twitter was— had way too many employees. There's a lot of redundancies and not needed roles. And so he felt that he could basically get rid of most people and Twitter could still do what it's supposed to do. And actually start making money. So he goes through the process of firing all these Twitter employees. He does it by reviewing 3 things. So the first thing is, 1, making sure that they're loyal, 2, making sure that the employee is competent, and number 3, that they have opted into the hardcore culture. So for number 1, for loyalty, he basically had his— he brought some of his employees from, uh, Tesla and SpaceX to help him kind of deal with the, the new Twitter purchase and getting rid of the employees that he needed to get rid of at Twitter. So he had his team go and look at the public Slack, uh, Twitter, the public Slack and Twitter internal, uh, communication and go through and identify anybody who was basically talking smack against Elon Musk before he purchased Twitter. To identify, you know, this person is not going to be a loyal, you know, employee to, uh, to Elon Musk. So he had his internal team go through and identify the people who won't be loyal so that they could be fired. And then once that was done, then he had his, his team look and, and review the code written by each employee to determine if they're competent or not. And so he had his, his engineers from his other companies review the code for the Twitter employees and identify anybody who's not competent. And they fired the people who were not competent by reviewing their code. And then that's, that's the second thing that they did. And the third thing was basically have an opt-in to the hardcore culture. So they sent out an email that said, hey, we're changing things here at Twitter. And if you want to basically opt into this hardcore culture that we're going to implement, go ahead and click in the, uh, the box below that says, yes, I'm opting into this hardcore culture. And they kind of described what that would mean. And they sent that out to all the Twitter employees. And, uh, and then they had like, I think, um, a little over half, if I'm remembering correctly, a little over half opted into the culture. So. And the end state is they, they ended up firing 75% of the Twitter employees using that process. And that was basically the intent was to run a leaner team that was, that fit in with the culture. And so it's like to kind of summarize Elon Musk and his, his leadership style from what I learned from the biography is, you know, creating that culture that we just talked about with, with Twitter and then being decisive. You know, not being focused and hung up on plans, but having an action towards bias and iterating over, over problem sets to get to the final solution. And then also, leaders are readers, right? He is an avid reader who learned a lot of what he knows from reading, and that includes biographies. So I hope, I hope this was an enjoyable podcast. Definitely recommend checking out Elon Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson. Super interesting. And with that, I'll see you next week.