The Book of Elon with Eric Jorgenson

**David Senra** (0:02)
All right, so I have an advanced copy of your book, The Book of Elon, Elon Musk's most useful ideas in his own words. You just said something that there's only four of these copies in the world. Who has them?

**Eric Jorgenson** (0:12)
It's a pretty special list. It's like Naval Ravikant, Mr. Beast, Ivanka Trump and you.

**David Senra** (0:19)
Okay, so the idea for this is you spent five years, thousands of hours studying Elon. He's been a personal hero of yours for a very long time. I just want to like, I obviously read and reread the book. I'm just going to run through a bunch of highlights and ideas that I thought were interesting and just kind of throw them to you and you see what you find interesting about it or add additional context. So something we were talking about when we were having coffee this morning is the importance of encouraging as many people as possible. We have enough deal makers. We need people making products and building companies. You don't need to be doing deals all day long. And that is a main theme that Elon talks about all the time. And so he says this quote in the book, which I loved, I do not start companies at the standpoint of what is the best risk adjusted rate of return or what I think could be successful. I just find things that need to happen and I try to make them happen. I thought these things needed to get done. If the money was lost, okay, it was still worth trying. What is his mindset around what he chooses to spend his time and energy on?

**Eric Jorgenson** (1:16)
He seems to attack problems that nobody else is working on that have a positive impact on the future. That's his philosophy and mindset going into everything he does, which is, I think, unique. A lot of people assume that he's money-motivated or a lot of people are money-motivated. And you hear entrepreneurs all the time talk about like, oh, this is a great business model, this is a good place to go in, I'm going to go start self-storage because the failure rate is so low. And this is not how he thinks in any way, shape, or form. He literally says nobody else is crazy enough to try space, so that's the company I have to go build because nobody else is working on it and I can't.

**David Senra** (1:47)
He has a great line in here. He's like, don't start a company because you want to be an entrepreneur or because you want to make money. It is better to approach from this angle. What is a useful thing you could build that you wish existed in the world?

**Eric Jorgenson** (1:58)
Yeah, I think there's a paradox there of like the thing that you can do that nobody else is working on is actually more likely to be successful. Like it forces you to try to do something unique that also ends up being more valuable for everybody else because you're solving a problem, you're adding a capability to humanity. You're not just starting another commodity business of some sort.

**David Senra** (2:19)
Yeah, I think it's important to point out the context in which he started like SpaceX and Tesla.

**Eric Jorgenson** (2:24)
He's been thinking about these problems since he was in college, literally, like even younger as a kid, he was very influenced by sci-fi and thinking about things that are possible. He talks about engineering as magic. He's like, if you build something that couldn't previously exist, that's like being a magician and like who wouldn't want to be a magician. Like there's a whole section, not just a chapter, like a section in this book about the value of engineering and the fact that excellent engineers are the fundamental constraint on building and growing civilization and the constraint on advancing these companies. He's like, I have all the money I need. Like the constraint is not capital. The constraint is truly excellent engineers.

**David Senra** (3:02)
Does he go into detail how he finds truly excellent engineers?

**Eric Jorgenson** (3:05)
Yeah, he's like interview process. I mean, part of it, a lot of it just comes from him being really good engineer himself. Right, so you can take the questions, like he looks for evidence of exceptional ability, he says.
He looks for people who've really solved a specific problem, and he asks detailed questions about a hard technical problem that you've solved in the past. And he's got a good bullshit radar. Like you could ask the same questions or I could ask the same questions and not have the same ability to scrutinize and determine who's truly excellent that he does because he's so close to all this all the time. But that's his advantage. He really biases towards hiring young, unproven engineers and then giving them like a shocking amount of accountability and responsibility. And that's part of the benefit of the iteration rate of these companies is he can figure out who knows what works. It's like in wartime how you get these like skip level promotions, you just find competent people and like give them more responsibility as fast as you can. Like that's how these companies operate.