00:00 Speaker A
I’ve known Elon for almost 25 years. He uh he bought my house here in Los Angeles when he moved to LA after his days of PayPal. And um, not just, you know, how he negotiated the the purchase of the house, we became friendly. I was an early advisor at Tesla. Um, and I’ve I’ve known him for a long time. I’ve watched him lead from the front where he stayed with his teams all through the night putting together Model X’s and showing them exactly how to do it and you know, reinforcing that the engineering was done right, but
00:30 Speaker A
this is a very authentic human through and through.
00:33 Speaker B
Scott, I think I’ve heard you refer to Musk. I think you put it like this. You said, the king of the big idea. What did you mean by that, Scott?
00:46 Speaker A
Well, I don’t think anybody thinks bigger than Elon. Um, you know, he is an engineer at heart. So engineers fundamentally look for problems to solve. He’s a hammer looking for a nail everywhere, but his breadth is enormous. I mean, he really does like thinking about civilization scale problems. Um he’s thinking about humanity being a multi-planetary species. Um this this whole thing about um, you know, Twitter and then X is really about saving freedom of speech. He’s thinking about things much much more broadly than a traditional executive might. And, you know, your your lead into the story is, you know, this is I think much more about um the uniqueness of Elon Musk. He’s not just a generation generational entrepreneur. He is truly one of a kind, a totally unique human.
01:29 Speaker B
When you look at SpaceX, Scott, I’m curious, how much of that company, how much of that culture is about Musk himself, in your opinion?
01:38 Speaker A
Well, you know, there’s a lot of ways to describe what’s happening at SpaceX, but clearly they are bending light in the sense that they don’t work against normal time constraints. Much of that is because of his first principles principles orientation to problem solving. You know, I try to emulate a lot of what I learned from Elon into my businesses and I may, you know, a three-time public company CEO and I’m uh right now running a company and going through a turnaround. We talk about first principles. It’s not an easy thing for most people to understand.
02:07 Speaker A
First principles is largely misunderstood. It’s about getting to the essence of a thing, understanding what is its truth and then refocusing all of your priorities on solving those fundamental problems first, and only once you solve those problems can you move on to the other things. That is a massive radical shift in terms of how we are taught to uh prioritize as executives, as entrepreneurs, and so he’s really rewriting the rules of business and I think it’s definitely proven that he can do things that nobody would be able to do in the time that he’s able to do them.
02:37 Speaker A
and he just sees most problems, almost anything, impossible for him is really the beginning of an engineering problem.
