Musk Operates Like a 19th Century Industrialist →

Marc Andreessen on Chris Williamson’s podcast:

I’m not aware of another current CEO who operates the way that he does. But if you go back in history, you find characters more like him, especially the industrialists of the late 1800s, early 1900s, people like Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie, or Thomas Watson, who built IBM.

The top line thing is just this incredible devotion from the leader of the company to fully, deeply understand what the company does and to be completely knowledgeable about every aspect of it and to be in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work, deeply understanding the issues and being the lead problem solver in the organization.

Basically what Elon does is he shows up every week at each of his companies, identifies the biggest problem that the company is having that week and fixes it. Then he does that every week for 52 weeks in a row. And then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year. Most other large companies are still having the planning meeting for the pre-planning meeting, for the board meeting, for the presentation, for the compliance review and the legal review.

He delegates almost everything… [except] the biggest problem right now until that thing is fixed.

The best founders focus on fixing their biggest problems instead of managing them - but doing this week after week, year after year, is a brutal standard that most can’t meet.