Elon Musk is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, and Marc Andreessen has a well-thought out theory on what makes him tick.
In a recent appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast with Stripe’s co-founders, Andreessen—the legendary venture capitalist and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz—offered a detailed breakdown of what he calls “the Elon method” for running companies. It’s a management philosophy that flies in the face of a century of conventional wisdom, and Andreessen believes it’s dramatically understudied. “Do you think people under study the Elon method for running companies?” Andreessen was asked. A hundred percent, yes,” he replied, noting that people are “so incurious about it” partly because Musk “generates emotion in people.”
Throwing Out the Playbook
Andreessen began by contrasting Musk’s approach with traditional management theory, which dates back to Alfred Sloan’s General Motors. The conventional system, as outlined in business schools and management books over the past century, involves a CEO at the top of a hierarchical machine, receiving reports and responding to them, with layers of rules and middle management in between.
“And then there’s Elon just—just doesn’t do any of that,” Andreessen explained. “He has a completely different playbook.”
The Elon Method: Five Core Principles
According to Andreessen, the Elon playbook boils down to several key principles:
First, it’s engineers-only at the top. “The people who matter in your company are the engineers. The people understand the technical content of what you’re doing for technology companies,” Andreessen said. This isn’t just about hiring engineers—it’s about recognizing them as the only voices that truly matter in driving the company forward.
Second, ruthlessly violate the chain of command. “You never, ever talk to mid-level management,” Andreessen explained. “If you are the CEO to get the truth, you only talk to the line engineer. And so you just ruthlessly violate the chain of command at all times.” Middle management can handle vacation policies and administrative tasks, but when it comes to understanding what’s really happening, Musk goes straight to the source.
Third, the CEO’s job is to fix the most important bottleneck every week. “Your job as the CEO is every week to fix whatever is the most important bottleneck to the company’s progress,” Andreessen said. “And the way that you do that is you parachute in and you find the engineers that are working on that problem and you basically stay up with them all night until they fix the problem.”
Fourth, conduct engineering reviews, not product reviews. When there’s no major bottleneck to address, Musk spends his time doing deep engineering reviews. “You get all the engineers together and you have them each present what they’re doing for five minutes. And the result of that is, you know every single engineer in the company, you know exactly what they’re working on. If somebody’s not good, you fire them on the spot. If somebody’s great, you call it out to get them.”
Fifth, build a cult of personality. “It’s gonna be a cult of personality and it’s gonna be a cult of personality not just inside the company, but outside the company,” Andreessen noted. “And we’re not gonna spend any money on marketing. We’re not gonna put any time at IR. We’re gonna do is we’re gonna put on the show of all time. And the company and the stock and the books and the videos and the products and the jobs are all a function of the cult of personality.”
The Catch: You Need To Be Elon
When asked about the dangers of entrepreneurs copying this approach, Andreessen offered a crucial caveat from his partner Ben Horowitz: “Marc, the thing you don’t get is as follows, which is that assumes you have somebody like Elon who can hold the entirety of every engineering topic and every reason topic in their head all at the same time.”
The key distinction from the Steve Jobs era of CEOs wearing turtlenecks and “being an asshole” is substance over style. “When you’re sitting there with the 23-year-old engineer and you’re working with them to redesign the database architecture or whatever, you actually are qualified to do that,” Andreessen explained. “And you’re qualified to do that, not just that one time, but every time.”
Andreessen posed the critical question: “How many of those people exist who can possibly do that? And we know the answer is one.” Though he’s optimistic there might be ten, a hundred, or even a thousand such individuals, he’s not sure it extends to millions.
The Broader Implications
This management philosophy helps explain how Musk simultaneously runs Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. By eliminating management layers and personally understanding every technical detail, he can context-switch between wildly different industries—from electric vehicles to rockets to brain-computer interfaces—with remarkable effectiveness.
The approach has proven spectacularly successful. Tesla has revolutionized the automotive industry, SpaceX has made reusable rockets routine and dominates commercial space launches, and Starlink is connecting remote areas globally. Even his transformation of Twitter into X demonstrate the same hands-on, engineer-first approach.
However, Andreessen’s analysis also reveals why this method hasn’t been widely adopted: it requires an almost superhuman breadth and depth of technical knowledge, combined with boundless energy and the ability to context-switch between complex domains. Most executives simply can’t hold “the entirety of every engineering topic” in their heads simultaneously.
For entrepreneurs and business leaders, the lesson isn’t necessarily to copy Musk’s playbook wholesale—few have the technical chops to pull it off. Instead, the takeaway might be to question whether traditional management hierarchies truly serve innovation, and to consider how much closer to the technical work leadership should be. In an era where technology moves faster than ever, the Alfred Sloan playbook from General Motors’ heyday may indeed be obsolete, even if not everyone can execute the Musk alternative.