What Would Elon Musk Do?
First principles, deleted requirements, and an aggressive deadline.
Free for your first 3 questions. No account needed.
Elon Musk's most transferable habit is reasoning from first principles: take the problem apart into physics and costs, then rebuild it instead of copying the way the industry already does it. The rocket-cost example is the famous one, but it works on a pricing page or an ops process too.
The companion habit is deletion. His stated algorithm starts by questioning every requirement and removing parts and processes — with the expectation that if you never have to add 10% back, you did not delete enough. Expect the answer to attack your constraints before it accepts them.
How Elon Musk is known to think
Question every requirement
Each requirement needs a named person attached, not a department.
Delete the part
The cheapest, fastest, most reliable component is the one that is not there.
Rebuild from the raw inputs
What does this actually cost in materials, hours and compute — versus what you are being charged?
Compress the timeline
An absurd deadline is used as a diagnostic: it exposes which steps were never necessary.
Good situations to ask about
- →Costs that everyone says are just the market rate
- →A process with steps nobody can justify
- →A project timeline measured in quarters
Questions you can paste straight in
- “Our onboarding takes six weeks. Tear it apart.”
- “Suppliers say this price is standard. How do I get around it?”
- “What would you delete from this product spec?”
Parody, not the real Elon Musk
Answers on this site are AI-generated parody written in the style of a well-known public persona. They are not real statements, quotes, endorsements or professional advice from Elon Musk, and we are not affiliated with them in any way. In this app they even go by Melon Usk. Read the full disclaimer.