Most people struggle to run a single company, but Elon Musk is currently running six — he’s currently leading Tesla, SpaceX, X, xAI, Neuralink and The Boring Company, and these companies are managing to beat competitors in their respective industries. And Musk seems to use an idea that many early managers struggle with to get these superhuman results.
Elon Musk delegates “almost everything” at his various companies, VC Marc Andreessen has revealed. Instead of involving himself with the details of the workings at all his companies — which would be impossible to do — he simply picks out the most pressing issue at each company he sees, and helps to fix it. He then moves on to the next problem facing one of his companies.
“(Elon Musk) actually delegates almost everything,” Andreessen said. “He’s not involved in most of the things that his companies are doing. He’s involved in the thing that is the biggest problem right now until that thing is fixed. And then he doesn’t have to be involved in it anymore. And then he can go focus on the next thing that’s the biggest problem for that company right now,” he added.
“So for example, in manufacturing, there’s this concept of the bottleneck. In any manufacturing chain, there’s always some bottleneck. There’s always something that is keeping the manufacturing line from running the way that it’s supposed to. Whatever the bottleneck is, (it) is holding everything up. The job number one is to remove that bottleneck and get everything flowing again,” Andreessen continued.
“And I think (Elon) basically has universalized that concept,” Andreessen explained. “He basically looks at every company, like it’s some sort of conceptual assembly line. I don’t need to manage everything else because everything else by definition is running better than that. And so I can go focus on that,” Andreessen said.
But Andreessen said that Musk didn’t only focus on the most important problems, but he approached them differently from most other CEOs. “The other part of it is so compelling — and this is where I think a lot of especially non technical CEOs would really struggle to implement the method — is when he identifies the bottleneck, he goes and he talks to the line engineers who understand the technical nature of the bottleneck. And if that’s people on a manufacturing line, he’s talking to people directly on the line, or if that’s people in a software development group, he’s talking to the people actually writing the code. So he’s not asking the VP of engineering to ask the Director of engineering, to ask the Manager, to ask the Individual contributor to write a report that’s to be reviewed in three weeks. He doesn’t do that. He would like throw them all out of the window, but there’s just no way he would do that. What he does is he goes and personally finds the engineer who actually has the knowledge about the thing,” Andreessen said.
“And then he sits in the room with that engineer and fixes the problem with them. This is why he inspires such incredible loyalty from the technical people who he works with — they’re just like, wow. If I’m up against a problem that I don’t know how to solve, freaking Elon Musk is going to show up in his Gulfstream (jet), and he’s going to sit with me overnight in front of the keyboard or in front of the manufacturing line. And he’s going to help me figure this out,” Andreessen explained.
Andreessen seemed to say that Musk might be running six companies, but he doesn’t have to be involved in every aspect of their functioning. Instead, he’s chosen very competent people to run these companies, who do the job on his behalf. But if there’s a pressing issue in any of his companies, Musk gets all into solving it, before moving on to the next problem. It’s a unique approach, and seems to be working — not only are Musk’s companies pushing the boundaries of what seemed possible for humanity, they’ve also helped catapult him to become the richest man in the world.