Why Is Elon Musk So F'ing Successful?

And how do we do more of it?

“What have you gotten done this week?”

Jensen Huang, Brian Armstrong, Marc Andressen, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman.

Every person I’ve listed is an enormously successful multi-billionaire who has transformed their respective industries, and yet they are all in awe of one guy:

Elon Musk.

Love him, hate him, or really f’ing hate him, nobody is playing the game quite like Mr. Musk. These are four things about him that stand out to me after much revision and discussion.

1. He didn’t become a full-time VC. This might be the number one factor for why he rose to the top. Unlike many of his rich peers, Elon kept building hard companies, and since effective leadership (“person-who-does-stuff-ship”) is rarer than LP money, he got an outsized reward for this.

2. He keeps doing new stuff. When I ran track, during our long runs our coach would demand we pick up the pace at random intervals. His logic was that if you let yourself get too comfortable, then you would start slowing down and “fall off pace”. People are rarely stagnant, they’re either growing or falling off. I think this is why his

3. Random bursts of intensity work so well. If you’re either growing or falling off, then you want to try and keep growing as much as possible.

4. The companies all have interesting names and merchandise. At first I thought this was a superficial comment, but it’s underrated. I’ve rarely seen a boring Elon product or piece of merchandise. Starbase, CyberTruck, Raptor, Gigafactory, “Nuke Mars”, Blindsight…I mean, come on. If you’re going to spend your life force on something, at least make it badass.