Study of Elon Musk
- 08/17/2024 – Behind Elon Musk’s Management Philosophy: First Principles – WSJ
The entrepreneur has long talked about a physics-based, problem-solving viewpoint that his new Twitter CEO invoked in her first memo to staff
The first principles process involves envisioning what ultimate success looks like and then being open to any path that leads there. Even something so ingrained in traditional schooling, such as accreditation, showed how Musk’s mind applied first principles reasoning in decision making, raising very simple questions: “What’s accreditation? Why does it exist? What’s it for? What’s the cost? What’s the opportunity cost of doing that?”
And the answers can’t simply be: That is what other schools do.
“Reasoning by analogy, especially in the early days, is the thing that’s a total killer,” Dahn said.
Musk’s business successes and his often-stated focus on first principles have sparked interest in others. James Clear, the bestselling self-help author, has written about the approach, writing that while great minds from Aristotle to Johannes Gutenberg have employed such reasoning, “no one embodies the philosophy of first principles thinking more effectively” than Musk.
Ad Astra closed at SpaceX in Hawthorne, Calif., when Musk’s children moved on. Dahn has since spun off his work into Astra Nova School, an online offering for a broader population of students.
Still, it isn’t an easy approach. For Musk’s engineers, the work of unlearning assumptions can be challenging, especially at times when the tried-and-true method would be quicker.
Musk lectured on first principles at his children’s school years ago, diving into his reasoning behind starting SpaceX, including the math behind a rocket and the economics behind its costs.
As he began, Musk asked the kids: “Does anybody have any experience with first principles analysis?”
