Keith RaboisManaging Director, Khosla Ventures

Keith Rabois tells the story of Elon Musk observing interns waiting in line for coffee at SpaceX

Name: Keith Rabois tells the story of Elon Musk observing interns waiting in line for coffee at SpaceX
Uploaded: 2025-09-13T11:50:00+00:00
Duration: 1 min 34 s
Channel: Keith Rabois
Description: In this interview excerpt, Keith Rabois explains why Elon Musk can achieve outsized output despite having the same 24‑hour day as anyone else. He…

13 Sept 2025 · 2 min

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1:34

In this interview excerpt, Keith Rabois explains why Elon Musk can achieve outsized output despite having the same 24‑hour day as anyone else. He identifies two core habits: (1) treating every week as a measurable accomplishment that compounds over time, and (2) operating in a perpetual "founder mode" that eliminates entitlement. Rabois illustrates the latter with a story about Musk noticing interns waiting in line for coffee at SpaceX, sending a memo that questioned why they were wasting time and announcing the installation of cameras to prevent lines. He notes the public backlash but frames the action as a mindset that forces everyone to maximize every moment. Rabois then shares a principle taught by Max Levchin, likening productivity to gas expanding to fill its container: the time you give people to complete a task becomes the time they take, so constantly compressing the expected timeline accelerates cumulative achievements over months and years.

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How does Elon Musk do so much with the same 24 hours as the rest of us? What'd you do this week?
I mean, honestly, that's very insightful, which is if you approach every day and every week of your life with what you accomplished this week, I think that compounds, and very few people do that. So I think that's the number one ingredient. Second thing is I think he's founder mode on steroids. I should have pointed this out, that he's built all of his companies in founder mode. So when he was taking over X, I kind of tweeted out this example I knew from SpaceX. He once caught some interns in line waiting for a coffee at SpaceX. There was a line of interns piling up around their coffee machine at SpaceX, and he sent a memo to the company about it saying, like, wait, why are all the interns wasting all this time? If you feel like you have nothing better to do than waiting in line, you're at the wrong company. And by the way, I'm installing cameras to make sure that we don't have lines at the coffee shop. And so people went crazy on Twitter at the time because they're like, oh my God, that's so evil. You know, how could you do that? Put aside whether, you know, company should even have coffee. But, um, I, I think basically just having that mentality towards every bit of entitlement, stamping out entitlement and expecting people to accomplish things every day does compound over decades in his career. There's a principle Max Levchin taught me. It's like chemistry. Gas expands to the size of the container. So if you give people a quarter, it'll take a quarter. If you tell people they have a month, it'll take a month. If you tell people it'll take 2 weeks, it'll take 2 weeks. Tell 'em a week, it'll take a week. So you want to constantly compress the container size because those accomplishments, those building blocks add up over months, quarters, years, and now decades.