In this interview hosted by Evan Carmichael, Elon Musk discusses his personal productivity habits and philosophy. He explains that sleeping less than about six to six‑and‑a‑half hours reduces mental acuity, so he aims for that amount each night. Musk outlines a rigorous weekly travel and work schedule that shuttles him between SpaceX, Tesla, and OpenAI, leveraging his smartphone to handle email during “interstitial” moments. He emphasizes that roughly 80 % of his time is spent on engineering and design, working directly with teams on rockets, spacecraft, and vehicle production. Musk describes an 80‑100‑hour work week, recounting his early startup experience of sleeping on a couch and coding seven days a week. He advises entrepreneurs to be extremely tenacious, to conduct rigorous self‑analysis, and to focus on creating high‑utility impact—using a “utility‑delta × number‑of‑people” (area‑under‑the‑curve) framework. He suggests that most people do not need a PhD to be useful, and that open‑plan office layouts foster communication. Throughout, Musk stresses the importance of being useful, maintaining a relentless work ethic, and aligning effort with clear, high‑impact goals.
Chapters
I could drop below a certain threshold of sleep, and although I'd be awake more hours and I could sustain it, I would get less done because, um, mental acuity would be affected. A challenge for entrepreneurs is to say, well, what's the difference between really believing in your ideals and sticking to them versus pursuing some unrealistic dream that doesn't actually have merit? I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things, but actually almost Almost all my time, like 80% of it is spent on engineering and design.
What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe you have an amazing gift inside you that I want to see explode out onto the world. Now, I started the Mentor Me series to try to hang around people who've done a lot more than us, and hopefully by spending a little more time with them, hopefully some of their beliefs, their mindset, their thought systems seep into us to help us become the the best version of ourselves. So today we're gonna learn from one of the best, Elon Musk, and how he lives his crazy schedule. Mentor me, Elon.
Okay, so you're running— you're CEO of two companies, you're chairman of SolarCity, Talk about time management. How on earth do you do this? Do you get any sleep?
Sometimes not enough. Sleep is really great. Because I find if I don't get enough sleep, then I'm quite grumpy. I mean, obviously, I think most people are that way. And also, like, I try to sort of figure out what's the right amount of sleep, because I found I could have— I could drop below a certain threshold of sleep and although I'd be awake more hours and I could sustain it, I would get less done because mental acuity would be affected. So I found generally the right number for me is around 6 to 6.5 hours on average per night.
That's not too bad.
Yeah.
Right. And any other tips on—
That was an average though.
Right.
Any other tips on just managing to run 2 companies simultaneously? I mean, do you find— I mean, I know you're up here Monday, Tuesday. Is it all Tesla when you're up in Silicon Valley and all SpaceX Wednesday, Thursday?
Having a smartphone is incredibly helpful because that means you can do email during interstitial periods, like if you're in a car, you're walking, in the bathroom, everywhere. You can do email practically when you're awake. And so that's really helpful to have email for SpaceX and Tesla integrated on my phone. And then, and then it's just you have to apply a lot of hours to actual working, actually working. So the way I generally do it is I'll be working at SpaceX on Monday and then Monday night, fly to the Bay Area, spend Tuesday and Wednesday in the Bay Area, then at Tesla, and then fly back on Wednesday night, spend Thursday and Friday at SpaceX. In the last several months, then I would fly back here on a Saturday and either spend Saturday and Sunday at Tesla or spend Saturday at Tesla and Sunday at SpaceX.
And where do the boys fit in? You have 5 sons.
Yeah, I drag them—
Do they tag along with Dad on some of these trips?
I do drag them along on a lot of things, actually. They're remarkably unimpressed by— I think certainly being focused on something that you're confident will have high value to someone else and just being really rigorous in making that assessment Because people tend to— a natural human tendency is wishful thinking. So a challenge for entrepreneurs is to say, well, what's the difference between really believing in your ideals and sticking to them versus pursuing some unrealistic dream that doesn't actually have merit? And that is a really difficult thing to tell. Can you tell the difference between those two things? Right. So you need to be sort of Very rigorous in your self-analysis. I think certainly extremely tenacious. And then just work like hell. I mean, you just have to put in, you know, 80-hour, 80 to 100-hour weeks every week. That's a lot of work. And then all those things improve the odds of success. Okay. I mean, if other people are putting in 40-hour work weeks and you're putting in 100-hour work weeks, then even if you're doing the same thing, you know that in one year you will achieve what they achieve. You will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve. When my brother and I were starting our first company, instead of getting an apartment, we just rented a small office and we slept on the couch. And we showered at the YMCA, and we were so hard up we had just one computer, so the website was up during the day, and I was coding at night. 7 days a week, all the time. And I sort of briefly had a girlfriend in that period, and in order to be with me, she had to sleep in the office. So, work hard, like, I mean, every waking hour. That's, that's the thing I would, I would say, if you're particularly, if you're starting a company. And I mean, if you do simple math, say like, okay, if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100, you'll get twice as done, as much done in the course of a year as the other company.
So one of the, I think, most common questions I hear young people, ambitious young people ask is, I want to be the next Elon Musk. How do I do that? Obviously, the next Elon Musk will work on very different things than you did, but what have you done or what did you do when you were younger that you think sort of set you up to have a big impact?
Well, I think first of all, I should say that I did not expect to be involved in all these things. So the 5 things that I thought about at the time in college, now quite a long time ago, 25 years ago, making life multi-planetary, accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, the internet, broadly speaking, and then genetics and AI. I think I didn't expect to be involved in all of those things. I actually, at the time in college, I sort of thought helping with electrification of cars was how I would start out. And that's, uh, that's actually what I worked on as an intern, was, um, advanced, uh, ultracapacitors with— to see if they— if there would be a breakthrough relative to batteries for energy storage in cars. And then when I came out to go to Stanford, um, that's what I was going to be doing my grad studies on, is, um, was working on advanced, uh, energy storage technologies for electric cars. And then I put that on hold to start an internet company in '95 because there does seem to be like a time for particular technologies when they're at a steep point in the inflection curve. And I didn't want to, you know, do a PhD at Stanford and then watch it all happen. And then— and I wasn't entirely certain that the technology I'd be working on would actually succeed. You can get a doctorate on many things that ultimately are not, do not have a practical bearing on the world. And I wanted to, you know, just, I really was just trying to be useful. That's the optimization. It's like, what can I do that would actually be useful?
Do you think people that want to be useful today should get PhDs?
Mostly not.
So what is the best way to be useful?
Some yes, but mostly not.
How should someone figure out how they can be most useful?
Whatever this thing is that you're trying to create, what would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect? So that's why I think having something that makes a big difference but affects a sort of small to moderate number of people is great, as is something that makes even a small difference but but affects a vast number of people. Like the area under the curve. Yeah, exactly. The area under the curve would actually be roughly similar for those two things. So it's actually really about, yeah, just trying to be useful and matter.
When you're trying to estimate probability of success, so you say this thing will be really useful, good area under the curve, I guess to use the example of SpaceX, when you made the go decision that you were actually going to do that, this was kind of a very crazy thing at the time.
Very crazy, for sure. Very crazy. Yeah, people were not shy about saying that. But I kind of agreed with them that it was quite crazy. Crazy if the objective was to achieve the best risk-adjusted return. Starting a company is insane. But that was not my objective. We try to aim for something which is a very open plan to maximize communication and make it sort of fairly nice looking. This place used to be quite dismal. That's my office over there, actually. We really try to minimize the number of offices that we have because doors limit communication. Everyone at the company, with the exception of a few people like HR and finance, actually are in cubes. So this is just a little area where people can meet and have sort of impromptu meeting. Um, obviously also very open. I think it's actually quite helpful to have this openness because then you can sort of see what people are working on on their computers.
Now I've got a really special Elon Musk bonus clip on how to use your time the best way possible, but before that, I want you to make a commitment of the day. You just watched this video, don't just watch another video. Make it have an impact and a meaning in your life. I want you to commit to making a change somehow to your life or to your business. After watching this video, what are you committing to changing? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm really curious to find out. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, I'll see you soon, and enjoy the bonus clip.
How do you spend your days now? Like, what do you allocate most of your time to?
My time is mostly split, uh, well, it's split between SpaceX and Tesla, and of course I try to spend, um, uh, part of every week at OpenAI. So I spend most, I spend basically half a day at OpenAI most weeks. And then I have some OpenAI stuff that happens during the week. But other than that, it's really SpaceX or Tesla.
And what do you do when you're at SpaceX or Tesla? Like what does your time look like there?
Yeah, so that's a good question. I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things, but actually almost Almost all my time, like 80% of it is spent on engineering and design. Engineering and design. So it's developing next-generation product. That's 80% of it.
You probably don't remember this, a very long time ago, many, many years, you took me on a tour of SpaceX. And the most impressive thing was that you knew every detail of the rocket and every piece of engineering that went into it. And I don't think many people get that about you.
Yeah, I think a lot of people think I'm kind of a business person or something, which is fine. Business is fine. But really, it's like at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell is Chief Operating Officer. She kind of manages legal, finance, sales, and kind of general business activity. And then my time is almost entirely with the engineering team working on improving the Falcon 9 and the Dragon spacecraft and developing the Mars Colonial Architecture. And then at Tesla, it's working on the Model 3 and, you know, something in the design studio, typically, yeah, half a day a week, dealing with aesthetics and look and feel things. And then most of the rest of the week is just going through engineering. Of the car itself as well as engineering of the factory. Raise your standard. Apple, at the core, its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me. I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated.
Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to see my all-time favorite top 10 10 Rules of Success, I have a very special secret video for you. These are the individual clips that I have personally learned the most from and applied to my life and my business. Check the link in the description for details.
