Elon Musk personally interviewed the first 3,000 people SpaceX hired. A top professor found 5 of his 10 best students ever were working there before it had even reached orbit (let me explain)

Listened to a Founders episode where David Senra rereads Liftoff by Eric Berger. It covers SpaceX’s first six years, and Berger interviewed Elon a lot for it, so it’s full of direct quotes.

I’ll give you some context. SpaceX started with an empty factory and a handful of people. At one of the early space meetings Elon announced he wanted to start a rocket company and people laughed and told him to save his money and go sit on the beach. In 2005 the US had close to zero share of commercial launches. By 2023 it had 54% of global commercial launch revenue, mostly Falcon 9. So I pulled out how he actually built it, roughly in order.

START WHERE AN INDUSTRY IS GOING BACKWARDS

Elon was almost 30, just out of PayPal, with about $180 million. He figured he could risk half on rockets. The US and Russia were using decades old tech and launch prices kept going up. One friend made an hour long video of rocket failures and made him sit and watch it. Didn’t work.

INTERVIEW EVERY HIRE YOURSELF

Elon personally met every person SpaceX hired through the first 3,000. His words: there are a ton of phonies out there, and he can usually tell within 15 minutes. He’d throw people off on purpose. One guy got asked if he dyes his hair before anything else. A few days later he got a job offer from Elon’s assistant at 1 in the morning and became employee 14.

GIVE PEOPLE THE JOB NOBODY ELSE WILL

An early SpaceX engineer had a friend at Lockheed working on the F-35. His entire job was finding a supplier for one bolt on the landing gear. At SpaceX a guy in his mid 20s was running the whole first stage propulsion system four months in.

That’s how he got the talent. A University of Michigan professor listed his 10 best students ever and found 5 of them at SpaceX, before it was successful, many taking pay cuts. Elon heard about it and asked for a meeting with one question. Who are the other five? And when one engineer wouldn’t move to LA because his wife worked at Google, Elon called Larry Page and got her transferred.

KNOW YOUR BURN RATE BY THE DAY

Senra pulls a story here from Ashlee Vance’s Musk biography. Elon told an early employee everything they did was a function of burn rate, and they were burning $100,000 a day. He’d refuse a $2,000 part because he expected you to find it cheaper or build it. But he’d rent a plane for $90,000 without blinking if it saved a whole workday. The rule wasn’t spend less. It was what does a day cost us.

HIRE THE PERSON YOUR CUSTOMERS ALREADY TRUST

Gwynne Shotwell told Elon in a meeting he needed a full time salesperson. That same afternoon he created a VP of sales job and encouraged her to apply. She’d be selling to people she’d worked with for years. She wrote a sales plan and Elon told her he didn’t care about plans, just get on with the job. She also vacuumed the conference room herself before a government meeting because there was no cleaning staff.

FIGHT WHEN YOU’RE RIGHT, EVEN IF YOU’LL PROBABLY LOSE

A rocket company called Kistler went bankrupt, and a year later NASA handed it a $227 million contract without opening it up to bids. Elon was told he had a 90% chance of losing a protest and would anger a big customer. He protested anyway. NASA pulled the award and opened a competition, and in 2006 SpaceX won $278 million from it.

He didn’t win every fight. SpaceX lost its lawsuit against the Boeing and Lockheed launch merger. But competitors were charging $26 to $28 million per launch, SpaceX could do it for $6 million, and Elon put that price right on the front of the website.

The idea I keep coming back to is the sales plan. When his engineers said something was impossible, Elon would ask what would it take. Same energy as telling Shotwell to skip the plan. That hit me because I’ve spent weeks writing plans for stuff I could’ve just started.

Fair warning, the book doesn’t hide what this cost. Regular all nighters, a macho culture where nobody wanted to go home first, and by 2008 Elon was out of money and divorced.

Does anyone here actually know their burn rate per day?

 Steve Jobs blew a deal he desperately needed with IBM. Years later he ended up as Disney’s biggest shareholder. The 12 years in between are the part of his story almost nobody studies (let me explain)

Listened to a Founders podcast episode where David Senra rereads Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. Schlender covered Steve as a reporter for over 20 years.

I’ll give you some context. The book asks how a guy so rash and wrong as a businessman that he got fired from his own company at 30 became the most admired CEO on earth. The answer is the years everyone skips, 1985 to 1997. Bad call after bad call at NeXT, but that’s where he learned almost everything that made the second run at Apple work. So here are the lessons in the order he learned them.

SAY YES FIRST AND FIGURE OUT THE HOW LATER

In 1976 Steve and Woz showed their computer at the Homebrew Computer Club and the reaction was meh. But the owner of a local store, the Byte Shop, came up after. The next day Steve walked in barefoot and left with an order for 50 computers at $500 each. $25,000. They had no parts, no factory, no workers. He said yes anyway.

CALL THE PEOPLE WHO ALREADY DID IT

At 12 or 13 Steve found Bill Hewlett in the phone book and asked him for parts. Hewlett gave him the parts and a summer job at HP. At 21 he called Andy Grove at Intel and asked to take him to lunch. Steve said he never found anyone who hung up on him when he asked for help. Most people just never pick up the phone.

COLLECT ALLIES BEFORE YOU NEED THEM

Young Steve treated anyone who wasn’t useful to his work as replaceable. So when things went bad at Apple, nobody had his back. It didn’t help that he slept on a win. In 1981 Bill Gates visited Apple right before IBM shipped its first PC and kept asking isn’t this a big deal? Nobody cared. Then came three flops in a row, the Apple III, Lisa and Mac.

Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar and worked with Steve for over 20 years, said Steve would sometimes ask him “why are they upset?” Catmull’s read was it was a lack of skill with people, not meanness. Which means it could be learned.

GIVE GOOD PEOPLE ROOM AND GET OUT OF THE WAY

He put about $50 million of the roughly $70 million he had into Pixar while it kept losing money. When John Lasseter asked for budget for a short film called Tin Toy, Steve’s whole answer was “just make it great.” It won the Oscar. Catmull taught him that sometimes the best management is to stop micromanaging, which went against every instinct he had.

ASK FOR 2 THINGS, NOT 6

At NeXT he had an IBM deal he badly needed. He held them up for more money, the IBM guy stopped taking his calls, and the deal died. In 1997 he called Gates to save Apple. Gates said the previous CEO wanted six things, most of them unimportant. Steve asked for two. Office for Mac for five years and a $150 million investment, and Apple drops the patent lawsuit. Done fast.

KNOW EXACTLY WHEN YOU HAVE LEVERAGE

Toy Story came out November 22, 1995, and Steve took Pixar public a week later. His logic was that if the movie hit, Disney would want to renegotiate, and with IPO money Pixar could put up half the costs and ask for half the profits. Toy Story did over $370 million and Disney took the 50/50 deal. Years later Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion and Steve became Disney’s biggest individual shareholder.

The part that stuck with me is the Catmull line. His bad traits never went away. He just learned to manage them. The IBM deal and the Gates deal are the same guy with the same ego, 10 years apart. That hit me because I’ve written off a lot of my own weak spots as just how I am.

Fair warning, the book doesn’t pretend he became a nice guy. Even late in his career his wife said they barely had a social life.

Has anyone here actually cold called someone way above their level and had it work?

Has anyone here actually tried Averr Aglow for acne? Been seeing them a lot lately. Curious if it genuinely helped with breakouts or if it's mostly good marketing. Honest experiences would be only pls!🙏🏻

The book is Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder. He wrote it at 30.

What makes it interesting is the timing. He’d already won in bodybuilding, but the acting and business stuff hadn’t happened yet. At the end of the book he basically says he’ll use the same system to become an actor and build a business. Then he did.

THE PLAN, IN HIS WORDS

At 15 he told his dad he wanted to be the best built man in the world, then go to America and be in movies. His dad told his mom they’d better take him to the doctor because he was sick in the head. His whole formula fits in three parts: self-confidence, a positive mental attitude, and honest hard work. He says lots of people know this. Very few actually do it.

Here’s how he did it.

HE FOUND ONE PERSON TO COPY

His hero was a bodybuilder named Reg Park. Arnold read everything about him, had friends translate the English articles, and learned how he trained, ate and lived. Later he got to train with him. He wrote down all of Reg’s advice and used whatever worked for his own body.

HE OUTWORKED THE SCHEDULE, NOT JUST THE PEOPLE

Most people trained 2 or 3 times a week. He went to 6, then twice a day.
His gym had no heat. He trained there on days when it was below zero.He trained all 12 months of the year while other bodybuilders took breaks.

HE TOOK RISKS FOR THE GOAL

During his year of required army service, he snuck off base to compete in Mr. Europe Junior. He won. He got caught climbing back over the wall and spent 7 days in military jail. He said he had his trophy and didn’t care.

HE CAUGHT HIS OWN LOSER THINKING

Before one contest he looked at photos of the other guys. Can’t beat him, can’t beat him. He went down the list and decided he might place 8th or 9th. He later called that a loser’s way of looking at it. He’d beaten himself before he even showed up.

HE STUDIED HIS LOSSES

He came second at Mr. Universe when he expected to win. Once he got past the disappointment, he made an honest list of his weak spots. He asked the winner what his secret was. Same exercises, more reps, and concentration. His friends wanted to throw him a party for second place. He went back to the gym.

HE TURNED IT INTO BUSINESS RIGHT AWAY

He used the publicity from second place to sell memberships at the gym he managed. Membership went from 70 to 200. He realized early that bodybuilding was really show business, and to make it big he had to be a showman.

HE MEASURED EVERYTHING

He measured his arms, calves and thighs regularly and tracked changes as small as an eighth of an inch on a calendar. He had photos taken at least once a month and studied them with a magnifying glass.

HE WROTE DOWN HIS GOALS

He kept them very specific. He said people think that boxes you in, but it did the opposite. Knowing exactly where he wanted to end up meant he could improvise how to get there. He won Mr. Universe in 1967 at 20. Then he set a schedule to train straight through the next year.

HE ALREADY KNEW WHAT CAME NEXT

The last part of the book is the plan. Mail order training courses, seminars all over the world, promoting competitions. He said he’d work on his accent as hard as he once worked on his weak calves.

His last line is basically that in his mind he’d already made the millions, and the rest was just going through the motions.

I finally read Open, Andre Agassi’s autobiography. People told me for years it was one of the best books they’d read, and they were right.

It’s about tennis, but honestly it’s about running your own head. That’s most of the job when you work for yourself.

PART ONE: THE RISE

His dad decided he’d be a pro before Andre was born. His math was that 2,500 balls a day is 17,500 a week, which is nearly 1 million a year, and a kid who hits that many can’t be beaten. Andre says he hated tennis and always did. He kept playing anyway.

He turned pro on his 16th birthday by cashing a $1,100 check. He had an eighth grade education. When he took the money, he said it felt like a whole shelf of possibilities fell away.

He won Wimbledon in 1992. He called his dad, and the first thing his dad said was that he had no business losing the fourth set. Then Andre realized his dad was crying.

The line I keep thinking about from this part: a win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn’t last as long.

PART TWO: THE FALL

He made it to number one and felt nothing. His conclusion was that he’d had the wrong goals. Number one was something other people wanted for him.

The best moment of that year wasn’t on a court. A restaurant manager he knew kept worrying about paying for his kids’ college. Andre quietly had his manager set aside Nike stock in the guy’s name. He said seeing the man’s face gave him more satisfaction than anything else that year.

Then it fell apart. A marriage he had doubts about from the start. No training. He admits in the book that he used meth during this time. He dropped to number 141 and ended up in the small challenger tournaments, which a former number one basically never plays.

PART THREE: THE COMEBACK

His coach Brad Gilbert finally sat him down. He said they weren’t leaving the room without a decision. Either quit, or go back to square one: fix your body, fix your head, start at the bottom.

Andre picked square one at 27, when most players start to fade. The advice Gilbert had given him when they first met is what made the comeback work:

Stop trying to be perfect. Gilbert said his real problem was perfectionism. He tried to hit a winner on every ball, missed, and it wrecked his confidence. Steady and boring would win 90% of the time.

You don’t have to be the best in the world. You just have to be better than the one guy across the net. Attack his weaknesses. Sometimes just let him fail.

Shrink the goal. It takes 21 sets to win a Grand Slam. Count backward from 21. Every set you win is one in your pocket.

Head beats talent. With his talent, if he was 50% on his game but 95% in his head, he’d win. Flip that and he’d lose, lose, lose.

In 1999 he made the French Open final and was losing badly. During a rain delay he told Gilbert the other guy was just too good. Gilbert, who never yelled, yelled. He told him to stop feeling sorry for himself, stop trying to be perfect, and just hit the ball. If you’re going to lose, lose on your own terms.

He came back and won.

I rewatched Jiro Dreams of Sushi this week. Most people watch it for the food. I watched it as a business case, and it’s honestly one of the best ones I’ve seen.

ON PAPER IT LOOKS LIKE A BAD BUSINESS

10 seats total.
It’s next to a subway station.
The restroom is outside the restaurant.
Sushi only. No appetizers, nothing else.
The whole meal takes about 15 to 20 minutes.

At the time of the documentary it cost 30,000 yen, and you needed a reservation.

When it got 3 Michelin stars, people were shocked and listed all the things it didn’t have. Here’s why it works anyway.

HE ONLY DOES ONE THING

He cut the menu down to almost nothing, then made every part of it as good as possible. A food critic in the film says the sushi is so simple that chefs from around the world ask how something that plain can taste that deep. Fewer things means each one can actually be perfect.

EVERY SUPPLIER IS A SPECIALIST

His tuna guy only sells tuna. His shrimp guy only sells shrimp. His rice guy only sells rice. The tuna dealer says if 10 tuna are for sale, only one can be the best, so he buys that one. If he can’t get it, he buys nothing. The rice dealer was asked to sell the same rice to the Grand Hyatt. He said no, because only Jiro knows how to cook it. Jiro’s line on this is basically that they’re experts in sushi, but each supplier knows more about their own thing than he does.

HE KEEPS IMPROVING THINGS THAT ALREADY WORK

He used to boil shrimp in the morning and keep it in the fridge, like everyone else. He admitted that was just easier. Now they boil it when the customer arrives. He used to massage octopus for about 30 minutes, which was already longer than anyone else. Now it’s 40 to 50 minutes. He said he doesn’t think he’s reached perfection, even after decades.

HE TASTES EVERYTHING FIRST

He tastes the food before it’s served. His rule is that if it isn’t better than last time, it doesn’t go out. He’s the chef, but he’s also his own first customer.

HE WATCHES EACH CUSTOMER

Sushi is supposed to be eaten right after it’s served, so he paces the meal like music. If he sees you eat with your left hand, the next piece goes on the left side.

TRAINING TAKES 10 YEARS

Apprentices start by squeezing hot towels by hand. It burns. Until they get that right, they don’t touch fish. One apprentice said he made over 200 batches of egg sushi, and every one was rejected. When one finally passed, Jiro told him that’s how it should be done.

HE NEVER STOPS

He was in his 80s in the film and still didn’t want to retire. He dislikes holidays because they keep him away from work. When the Japanese government gave him an award, he went to the ceremony during the day and was back at work that evening.

Part of why: he was told at age 9 he had no home to come back to. He said he worked so he wouldn’t have to sleep under a bridge, and that never left him.

The part that got me is the shrimp. He’d been doing it the easy way for years and it was already working. He changed it anyway because it could be better. I have a few things in my own business I’m doing the easy way, and I know it.

To be fair, it cost him. He said when his kids were small he was basically a stranger to them. Not everyone should want that trade.

What’s one thing in your business you’re doing the “easy way” that you know could be better?

hey so am looking at midwest real estate and keep seeing investor iq. Setup sounds a bit too polished with the 100% funding and sourcing etc. I have around 30k sitting around and i'm tired of stocks, but i'm not trying to get burned by a slick marketing thing. Anyone here actually worked with them? just want to know if they hit timelines and if the support is real also the lending thing lol

Brad Jacobs builds companies mostly by buying a lot of other companies and making them work together. His new book is How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars.

Most of it is about raising money and mergers. But the best parts are the simple questions and tests he uses over and over. You could copy almost all of them this week, so here they are.

THE 3 QUESTION EMPLOYEE SURVEY

He sends this to every employee every quarter, and right after buying a new company:
What’s working really well?
What needs fixing?
What’s your single best idea to improve the company?

That’s it. He says it shows people you actually want the truth.

THE TOWN HALL QUESTIONS

When QXO closed on Beacon, they sent a Zoom invite to everyone with a Beacon email within minutes of the press release. About 3,600 people showed up on 3 hours notice.
He gave a short intro and went straight to Q&A. No pre-screened questions.
Some of the questions he asks:

What are we doing that should be stopped right away?
What are we doing that annoys our customers?
What’s the biggest cause of waste?
Are we making decisions fast enough, or are we too bureaucratic?

He says the frontline people usually know exactly what’s broken. Nobody ever asked them.

THE ORG CHART TEST

A good org chart should fit on one page. If it looks like a bowl of spaghetti, it probably runs like one. He puts every role in one of 3 buckets: must have, nice to have, or what the hell. The third one obviously goes. But he says the biggest savings is actually in the nice to have bucket. Keep the best ones, cut the rest.

His other rules:

If someone manages one person, that’s not management. He calls it companionship.
He’s seen 9 layers between the customer and the CEO. Fewer layers means faster decisions.
An empty seat does less damage than the wrong person in it.
When he cuts after buying a company, it’s mostly middle and upper management, not the front line. A fish rots from the head.

THE THROAT TO CHOKE

A big merger can have thousands of tasks. Every single one gets one owner and a firm deadline. Not a team, not a department. One named person.

WHO NOT TO RAISE FROM

He’s raised around $50 billion from every kind of investor. His take on hedge funds: they say they’re long term, then sell as soon as the price goes up. One sold QXO shares a day before they were even allowed to. On debt, he keeps it around 1 to 3 times EBITDA. He’d rather be a little under optimized and sleep at night.

THE HALF AS UPSET TRICK

This one isn’t business, but he puts it first in the book. He learned it from psychologist Albert Ellis. Close your eyes, feel whatever’s upsetting you, then make yourself half as upset. The point is that the event doesn’t upset you. What you tell yourself about it does. So he catches the thought and rewrites it. “I always screw things up” becomes “this one didn’t go as planned, but I’ve done well before and I can learn from it.”

He’s also meditated twice a day since he was 16 and says he’s never missed a day.

The survey is the one I’m stealing. I’ve never asked my own people for their single best idea, which is kind of embarrassing once you say it out loud.

To be fair, a lot of this works because he’s buying big companies with plenty of fat to cut. A 10 person shop doesn’t have a “what the hell” bucket. Or at least hopefully not.

Has anyone here run an anonymous “what should we stop doing” survey? What was the most surprising answer you got?

Napoleon never wrote down his principles. He said people would be surprised at how simple they were. Other people collected them from his writing and published them in 1827. Stonewall Jackson carried a copy through the whole Civil War.

I read two versions this week, Roots of Strategy and an old 1943 edition called Napoleon and Modern War. Here’s what he said, and what I think it means if you run a business.

HE SAID: ASK YOURSELF SEVERAL TIMES A DAY WHAT YOU’D DO IF THE ENEMY SHOWED UP

Front, left, right. If the question makes you uncomfortable, your setup is wrong and you need to fix it.

IN BUSINESS: Ask “what if” about your own company. What if your biggest customer leaves? What if a competitor cuts prices in half? If you don’t have an answer, that’s your weak spot. Much cheaper to find it yourself than have someone else find it.

HE SAID: THINK HARD BEFORE YOU ATTACK. ONCE YOU DO, DON’T STOP

Advancing or not is a big decision. But once you start, you keep going all the way.

IN BUSINESS: Take your time deciding. Then stop second guessing. Half committing is usually worse than either option.

HE SAID: DON’T FIGHT WHERE THE ENEMY WANTS YOU TO

Avoid ground the enemy has studied, and even more ground they’ve fortified.

IN BUSINESS: Don’t go head to head with a big player on the thing they’re best at. Find the spot they ignore.

HE SAID: IF YOU’RE SMALLER, YOU HAVE TO BE FASTER

With fewer troops, you avoid a big open fight and make up for it with speed. One line from the book says the strength of an army is its size times its speed.

IN BUSINESS: If you’re small and slow, you lose. Speed is the one thing a big company can’t buy easily.

HE SAID: LONG ORDERS KILL SPEED

The 1943 book points out Napoleon gave orders in a few clear sentences. Long orders take time to write, read and understand.

IN BUSINESS: Every long email, deck and approval chain slows you down. Say it short.

HE SAID: ONE ARMY, ONE COMMANDER

When authority is split, opinions differ and you get confusion and delay. One leader moves with energy because he doesn’t have to keep conferring.

IN BUSINESS: One owner per project. “Shared ownership” usually means nobody owns it.

HE SAID: USE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE

Before a big battle, bring every unit. Sometimes one battalion decides the whole day.

IN BUSINESS: What do you already have that you’re not using? An email list, an old customer, a skill on your team nobody asks about.

HE SAID: KEEP A COOL HEAD

The first quality of a commander is not getting thrown by good news or bad news.

IN BUSINESS: A big win and a big loss should get the same calm look. Emotions make you decide badly in both directions.

HE SAID: YOU NEED TALENT AND COURAGE IN BALANCE

Too much courage for your ability and you take on things you can’t handle. Too little courage and you’re smart but never do anything.

IN BUSINESS: I know a lot of people in both groups. Very few in the middle.

HE ALSO PLAYED MIND GAMES

He praised a weak Austrian general in his reports. Austria figured the guy must be good if Napoleon liked him, so they kept him in charge. He stayed just as bad.

The one that got me is the “what if” question several times a day. I think about my weak spots maybe once a quarter, usually after something already went wrong.

To be fair, the guy who wrote all this still lost at Waterloo and died in exile. Good rules don’t save you from every mistake.

Which of these do you think matters most for a small business? I’d guess speed, but I’m curious if anyone thinks the single commander one matters more.

I'm a 23-year-old mechatronics engineer with a full-time job, considering automation services (lead follow-up, filtering inquiries, reporting) as a side business. I haven't sold any yet. For those who have:

How did you get your first paying client?

What do you charge, and is it one-off or retainer?

What would you do differently if you started today?

With so many people entering this space, is it still worth starting?

Honest answers, including "don't bother," are welcome.

I'm planning to start an e-commerce business and want to understand how things work before investing money. I'd love to hear practical advice from people with real experience, especially about choosing products, finding customers, and avoiding beginner mistakes.

Bezos sat down with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit. He barely does long interviews, so I went through the whole thing.

Most of the clips online were about politics and billionaires. The good stuff was in the boring questions. Here are the ones I’d actually read.

“HOW DID YOU KNOW AMAZON WOULD WORK?”

He didn’t. He sold 20% of the company for $1 million and it took about 50 meetings. The most common question investors asked him was what is the internet. He told every one of them he thought there was a 70% chance they’d lose their money.

“WHERE DOES YOUR CONFIDENCE COME FROM?”

He said it isn’t really confidence. His view is that people naturally overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. So he tries to correct for that bias on purpose. He added that thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“IS BLUE ORIGIN A HOBBY OR A BUSINESS?”

A business. Not a good one yet. But he said it could end up being the best business he’s ever been part of financially, bigger than Amazon. It’ll just take a while. He pointed out Amazon lost money for 11 years. Tom Brokaw once asked him if he could even spell profit. Bezos said yes, and spelled out “prophet.”

“YOU PAID YOURSELF ABOUT $80K. WHY?”

He already owned a big chunk as the founder, so he had plenty of incentive.  Then he said someone should rank people by how much wealth they create for others instead of how much they own. At the time Amazon was worth about $2.3 trillion and he owned about $200 billion of it. So by his math he created around $2.1 trillion for other people.

“HOW DO YOU RUN MEETINGS?”

Crisp documents, messy meetings. The 6 page memo should be really clear. The talk after it should wander. Once he could tell a team had rehearsed a meeting with him. He asked, they said yes, and he told them not to do that again. He wants to see the ugly parts, not get pitched. He always asks if there are dissenting opinions, and he talks last so he doesn’t steer the room.

“ARE YOU HARD TO CONVINCE?”

Mostly no. He said he’s easy to influence and changes his mind a lot. But a couple percent of the time, nothing can move him. Lots of people tried to talk him out of Fulfillment by Amazon. He said he’d do it through sheer will if he had to.

“WHAT DOES THE WORLD GET WRONG ABOUT YOU?”

He said he gave up on being understood a long time ago. It’s hard enough with your own family. He thinks of himself as an inventor, not an entrepreneur. And he only does an interview once in a while because every minute spent on one is a minute not spent on something else.

The one I keep thinking about is telling investors 70% odds of losing. Most of us pitch the best case and hope nobody asks. He led with the worst case and still raised the money.

To be fair, he was raising $1 million, not $50 million. Being that honest probably gets harder when the check gets bigger.

Would you tell an investor you thought they’d probably lose their money? Or is that only something you can say once you’re Bezos? 

Hello!

I’m a high school student currently working on an FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America) Business Ethics competitive event. This year’s topic focuses on a major corporate crisis—specifically, a large meat processing CEO discovering a dangerous, contagious bacterium in a small batch of beef, and having to choose between a massive, financially devastating total recall or keeping quiet to protect the bottom line.
As part of my research, I need to gather insights from real-world business professionals on how leadership navigates these ethical dilemmas. If any business owners, managers, or executives have a few minutes, I'd love your thoughts on any (or all) of these questions:

1. Prioritizing Stakeholders: When public health is threatened alongside massive financial losses, how do you determine which stakeholders (customers, employees, suppliers, investors) take absolute priority?

2. Departmental Clash: In high-stress crises, legal and financial teams often advise caution to protect the company, while quality assurance and operations focus purely on safety. How do you balance these conflicting departmental objectives as a leader?

3. Communication vs. Panic: How do you handle transparency with the public regarding a severe safety risk without sparking mass panic or permanently destroying consumer trust?

4. Proactive Safeguards: What preventative protocols or ethical frameworks should high-risk industries put in place before a crisis hits to avoid these terrible trade-offs?

I'd love to include your perspectives and industry experience in my research summary. Thanks so much for helping a student out!

Everyone shares Elon’s algorithm. Question requirements, delete, simplify, speed up, automate.

What people skip is where it came from. In Isaacson’s biography it’s clear he learned it the hard way, by doing it in the wrong order and almost killing Tesla.

THE MISTAKE

In 2018 Tesla had to make 5,000 Model 3s a week. Below that, the company would run out of money. Elon had pushed for a factory full of robots. Problem was, it didn’t work.He started with automation, which is the last step. Then he sped up processes that should never have existed. He says he spent a lot of time making things faster that he later just deleted.

THE FIBERGLASS STRIPS

One station kept slowing the line. A slow, expensive robot was gluing fiberglass strips onto battery packs. Elon asked what the strips were for. Engineering said the noise team wanted them. The noise team said engineering wanted them, for fire safety. He said it felt like a Dilbert cartoon. So he had them record the sound in the car with and without the strips. Nobody could tell the difference. Strips gone, robot gone.

THE PLASTIC CAPS

Battery packs left Nevada with little plastic caps on the prongs. In Fremont workers pulled them off and threw them away. Sometimes Nevada ran out of caps and had to hold shipments. Elon asked who required the caps. The team couldn’t find a single name. So he deleted them. They never had a problem with bent pins.

THE ROBOTS IN THE PARKING LOT

After that he flipped. He walked the line looking for any spot where removing automation would make it faster.They sawed robots out of the line and threw them in the parking lot. They had to knock a hole in the building wall to get the equipment out. He even said it publicly. Excessive automation was a mistake, his mistake, and humans are underrated.

THE TENT

Still short of 5,000 a week, he remembered a World War II story. When the government needed bombers fast, they built production lines in parking lots. So Tesla put up a giant tent in its parking lot. Three weeks later Model 3s were rolling out of it. A few weeks after that, they hit 5,000 a week.

THE ORDER IS THE WHOLE POINT

That’s why the steps go the way they do. First question every requirement and get the name of the actual person who made it. Then delete what you can.

Only then simplify. Then speed it up. Automate last.

His warning is that the most common mistake is simplifying something that shouldn’t exist.

He says he became a broken record about it. His executives apparently mouth the words when he starts.

Hi,

I run a B2B printing company based in the UK, offering prints like flyers, business cards, posters, banners, custom clothing etc.

I’m looking for ways to grow the business to a point where it’s steady and consistent, but I don’t have a huge amount of ideas regarding what channels to focus on, what works, what doesn’t, where to invest etc.

It’d be great to get some opinions on what works within the UK, and any other tips you may have, maybe from running your own business.

Also, as a 20 year old, it’d be great to connect with other business owners within the UK, this would be really helpful and greatly appreciated, comment if so.

Any feedback / advice would be great.

Hey, im 26 years old and i started getting into filmmaking since i was 21 years old in 2021
i have the right gear but i didn't do much with it
and i can't call it a business because i have no clients or good portfolio
and my girl is pressing me to engage with her this next year of 2027
and im just so lost sometimes i say i will just sell my gear that will get me around 1700$ only and i live in Algeria
anyone can give me advice or help on how to go on a real path to succeed and make profit and actual get married in short time
and please don't tell me this is unrealistic goal

I was rereading Made in Japan by Akio Morita, who co-founded Sony. Bezos, Jobs, Phil Knight and James Dyson have all said they learned from him, so I figured the book was worth a second look, and here's one story in it I can't stop thinking about.

Early on, Sony was a small, unknown company. Morita took one of their transistor radios to the US and showed it to Bulova, a big established watch company. They loved it and wanted 100,000 units. He said the order was worth several times Sony's total capital. One condition. The radios had to say Bulova, not Sony. Morita said no. He had already decided Sony would never make products under someone else's name. The Bulova buyer got annoyed. He said their name took over 50 years to build and nobody had ever heard of Sony, so why not use theirs?

Morita told him that 50 years ago Bulova's name was just as unknown as Sony's was then. He said he was taking the first step of the next 50 years, and that in 50 years Sony's name would be as famous as theirs. He walked away from the money. The buyers thought he was crazy.

What gets me is it wasn't a one time stubborn move. The whole book is him turning down the easy money because it didn't match where he was going. A few other things from it:

HE MADE BIGGER POCKETS

Sony's "pocketable" radio was a little too big for a normal shirt pocket. So he had shirts made for the salesmen with slightly bigger pockets. Problem solved. Kind of.

HE FOUND THE CUSTOMER WHO ALREADY HAD THE PROBLEM

Sony's first tape recorder flopped. Regular people thought it was an expensive toy. Then they realized Japan's courts were short on stenographers after the war. They demoed it for the Supreme Court and sold 20 right away. Same product, different buyer.

HE PAID HIS HARSHEST CRITIC

A music student named Norio Ohga criticized Sony's first tape recorder hard. Morita admitted he was right, and hired him as a paid critic while he was still in school. By the time the book came out, Ohga was Sony's president.

HE IGNORED HIS OWN TEAM ON THE WALKMAN

His co-founder Ibuka was lugging a heavy tape recorder and headphones around just to listen to music. Morita had engineers rip out the recording part and the speaker to make it small. Pretty much everyone said nobody would buy a tape player that can't record.

His answer: millions of people buy car stereos, and those don't record either. He took personal responsibility for it and it became a huge hit.

HE LET EMPLOYEES QUIETLY TRANSFER

At dinner, a young employee told him his boss was stupid, and as far as his career went, that boss was Sony. So Morita started a weekly internal paper listing open jobs, and let people apply to them confidentially. If a lot of people under one manager kept asking to transfer, they knew that manager was the problem.

The Bulova story hits me because I've taken the safe deal more than once. Never anything that size, but the same kind of choice, and I'm not sure I'd have had the nerve to say no with Sony's bank account.

To be fair, plenty of companies said no to the big order and just died. Morita had a product good enough to back it up.

What's the biggest deal you've turned down because it didn't fit where you were going? Did it pay off?

Hi! I'm from Brazil and I'm currently producing an e-book for anyone who wants to learn Portuguese from scratch. As a native Brazilian, there's no better way to learn than with a local! You'll learn slang, real conversations, everyday dialogues, abbreviated words, and more.

It's only $5 (PayPal: kaioaquino919293@gmail.com). When it's ready, you'll be able to get it, just get in touch with me. I'm just asking for your help to make a dream come true, and in return, you'll receive a complete guide. Just send me a message and as soon as it's ready, it's yours. Can you please help me? ❤️

Hi everyone! This is my first post on Reddit, and i thought i would start by asking someting i have been curious about.
I'm interested in understanding how business actually works, especially how businesses understand their markets, find customers, and grow. For people who have experience in business, what do you think a beginner should focus on learning first ?
I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

From restaurants to big brands, every business has a story behind its revenue, expenses, and profits. 📊

Welcome to Mr. Karobaar — where we break down how businesses work and how they make money, in a simple and interesting way! 🚀

If you're interested in business, money, and entrepreneurship, join the journey!

👉 Subscribe here: https://www.youtube.com/@Mr.Karobaar

💬 Question: Which Indian business would you like me to break down first?

Dietrich Mateschitz started Red Bull. He died recently, and I went through the only biography of him (it's in German) plus a long Bloomberg piece. He did almost everything the opposite of how you're supposed to.

HE STARTED LATE

He sold toothpaste for a Unilever company and was on the road 3 to 4 months a year. Around 38 he got sick of the same gray planes and gray suits. He quit at 41 and put in everything he had. He said if it failed he'd be sleeping under a bridge.

HE FOUND IT BY ACCIDENT

On a trip to Thailand he tried a local tonic that fixed his jet lag. Later he read that the biggest corporate taxpayer in Japan that year made drinks like it. So he partnered with the Thai guy who made it, and they each put in $500,000. His idea was to sell it in the West, carbonated.

HE STAYED SMALL FOR 5 YEARS

Germany took over a year just to figure out what an energy drink was legally. So he launched only in Austria in 1987. The second country didn't come until 1992. Five years in one small market, fixing the product and the message before going bigger.

HE DIDN'T CARE HOW IT TASTED

He said taste didn't matter at all. To him it wasn't a soda, it was something you drink to perform better. He also priced it way above every other drink on the shelf. His logic was that a small markup makes you a fancy soda, while a big one makes you something new.

HE LET THE RUMORS RUN

People said the taurine came from bull testicles. He didn't fight it. Red Bull even put a page about the rumors on its website. His view was that the worst thing for a brand is people not caring. Germany banned it for years, so people smuggled cans in from Austria. Once it was legal, it sold 33 million cans there in the first 3 months.

HE HATED DEBT

Every bank said no except one small private bank. He stuck with that one bank and avoided debt for good after that. They broke even in year 3 and stayed profitable. No dividends until 1999. He lived on his salary and put everything back into the company.

HE ONLY DID MARKETING

No factories, no warehouses. Everything else was outsourced. The main bottling deal was a handshake in 1987, and it was still going. He said no to every licensing offer. No gummy bears, no perfume. Just the drink.

HE MADE HIS OWN ADS AND GAVE THEM AWAY

Cliff diving, air races, a guy jumping from space. Red Bull kept the rights to the footage and gave it to TV stations for free. Over 70 stations ran the Air Race. They got free content. He got free airtime. He never sold and never went public. His answer was basically, can you picture me at a shareholders meeting?

What gets me is the 15 years without a dividend. He owned 49% of something that later paid him hundreds of millions a year, and he just waited.

To be fair, a lot of this only worked because the drink took off in clubs. Plenty of people try five slow years and run out of money.

Would you have stayed in one tiny market for five years? Or expanded the second it started working?

Checked an essay by Max Olsen called "Atoms Are Cheap, Process Is Pricey." He's writing a book on SpaceX's first decade using their actual company updates and internal memos.

I’ll give you some context. In September 2008 SpaceX had money for exactly one more Falcon 1 launch after three explosions. It worked, and a $1.6 billions NASA contract came six weeks later. Today, according to the essay, they put more mass into orbit than every other launch provider on Earth combined. The essay's real question is why nobody has copied them when SpaceX has basically explained how they work in public for years. So I turned it into steps you can actually try on your own business, roughly in the order SpaceX did them.

RUN THE IDIOT INDEX ON YOUR BIGGEST COSTS

In 2001 Elon tried to buy Russian ICBMs to get to Mars, and the prices he got back were ridiculous. So he asked what a rocket is actually made of. Aluminum, some titanium, copper, carbon fiber. Then he looked up what those cost on the commodity market. About 2% of the price of a rocket. For a car it's more like 20 to 30%. The rest was going to supplier markups stacked on top of each other, custom one off designs, and throwing the hardware away after every flight. None of that is physics.

He later named it the idiot index. The cost of a part divided by the cost of its raw materials. If the number is high, you're an idiot. His words. Try this on your biggest expenses. Most will be fine. One of them probably won't be.

MAKE IT YOURSELF WHEN THE QUOTE IS STUPID

A vendor quoted $120,000 and 18 months for an actuator on the Falcon 1. SpaceX engineers built it for $3,900. Another supplier basically smirked and walked out after hearing SpaceX's budget and timeline for an engine valve. So they made the valve themselves.

They ended up building about 80% of their hardware in house. What I liked is that this wasn't some big philosophy. One engineer said they never set out to do it. Suppliers just kept quoting prices and timelines that didn't work, so they kept saying fine, we'll do it. A NASA study estimated SpaceX built Falcon 9 for about $440.000.000, and that the same work with traditional contractors would've cost 3 to 10 times more.

SELL ONE THING AND MAKE CUSTOMERS ADAPT

The old way was a custom rocket for every mission. SpaceX went the other way and built the Falcon 9 over and over. Same engines, same diameter, same materials. Even Falcon Heavy is just three Falcon 9 first stages strapped together. They published a user guide with their specs, and customers designed their satellites to fit the rocket instead of the other way around. Customers wanted custom. They wanted cheap more. When forced to pick, they adapted.

The essay gives Gwynne Shotwell, the president, a lot of credit here. Sales teams usually promise customers whatever they want, which creates exactly the custom mess engineering is trying to kill. She got NASA and the Pentagon, probably the most conservative buyers on earth, to accept a standard product.

BUILD 10 CHEAP VERSIONS INSTEAD OF 1 PERFECT ONE

Traditional aerospace does a huge amount of analysis before building anything. SpaceX builds, tests, breaks it and learns. Elon's goal for Starship prototypes was to push them until they blow up. If it doesn't fail, you don't know where the limit is. One quote from him I liked: a high production rate solves many ills. If you only have a few engines, you can't risk blowing them up, so you play it safe and learn slowly. That's partly why Starship is stainless steel instead of carbon fiber. Steel is cheap and you can weld it in a tent. Carbon fiber is expensive and needs giant ovens.

They're not reckless everywhere, though. Dragon carries people, so it gets huge safety margins. Starship has nobody on board, so they let it fail. Same company, totally different risk levels.

DELETE REQUIREMENTS, ESPECIALLY FROM SMART PEOPLE

Falcon 9's grid fins were designed to fold, like traditional ones, to cut drag. Somebody asked if that was worth the extra weight and complexity. Simulations said fixed fins were fine, so they deleted the whole mechanism. Every requirement has to have a named person who owns it and can explain why it exists. If they can't, it goes. Engineers are told that requirements from smart people are the most dangerous ones, because nobody questions them. And Elon's rule: if you're not adding back at least 10% of what you deleted, you didn't delete enough.

FIND THE BOTTLENECK AND THROW EVERYTHING AT IT

When Starship was held up by Raptor engine production, that became the company's whole focus. Daily updates, memos to the company, people moved over from other projects. When it broke through, attention moved to the next constraint. A NASA manager who visited said when a new problem shows up there, it looks like a flash mob in the hallway. Hiding a blocker is what gets you in trouble. Saying you're stuck is expected.

TALK TO THE PEOPLE DOING THE ACTUAL WORK

Andrej Karpathy, who worked for Elon at Tesla, says Elon spends about 50% of his time talking directly to engineers instead of VPs. In most companies every layer of management cleans up the bad news a little more. By the time it reaches the CEO it's a summary of a summary. Talking to engineers directly skips that, and it let Elon make calls like steel over carbon fiber, which a lot of people inside the company thought was wrong.

The essay's main point, which I didn't get until the end, is that none of these work alone. Making parts in house only pays off if you have volume. Volume only works if you sell one standard product. Failing fast only works if your people are fine failing in public. Competitors copy one piece, it breaks, and they decide the idea doesn't work. That hit me because I've done exactly that. Grabbed one tactic from a company I admire and dropped it when it didn't work on its own.

Fair warning, the essay even admits that at low volume, owning your own production is a liability. Making things in house can sink a small business if you don't have the volume to back it up.

Has anyone here actually run the idiot index on their own costs? 

Reading The Man Who Solved the Market by Gregory Zuckerman, about Jim Simons and Renaissance.

Everyone talks about the returns. What I didn't expect is how much of the book is about people leaving Simons right before it worked. Some of them were really smart, and they were all sure they were making the right call.

LEONARD BAUM

Simons left academia at 40 to start trading. His dad told him he was making a big mistake giving up a secure job. His first partner, Baum, traded on gut feel and did great for a while. He thought building computer models was a waste of time when you could just make money the normal way. Then in 1984 the losses piled up. Once his positions were down 40%, a clause in their deal forced Simons to sell everything and end the partnership. Simons was 46, losing millions a day, and thinking about quitting. He said sometimes he felt like some guy who didn't know what he was doing.

JAMES AX

Simons recruited Ax by pitching investing as the ultimate puzzle. They built the system that turned into the Medallion fund. By 1989 the fund was down $20 million and people in the office thought Simons might shut it down. Ax ended up selling his stake.

ELWYN BERLEKAMP

Berlekamp bought Ax out and made one big change. Hold trades for a short time and trade way more often. Basically act like a casino. If you make enough bets, you only need to be right a little more than half the time. They cut the average hold to about a day and a half. It worked almost right away. 1989 was down 4%. 1990 was up 55.9%. There were so many million dollar days that the champagne celebrations got a bit out of hand.

In the middle of that, Simons said he thought they could do 80% a year. Berlekamp thought 30% was more realistic. So he said, if you think it's worth that much more, buy me out. Simons did, in December 1990. Berlekamp got 6x what he'd paid 16 months earlier and thought it was a steal. Simons' reaction was basically, fine, I'll run it myself.

SANDOR STRAUS

Straus built the giant database of clean historical prices that gave them an edge nobody else had. When Simons moved everyone to the Long Island office, Straus wouldn't go. He sold his shares in 1996 and quit. Later he said he thought they were one of many firms, and if he'd known there was a secret sauce he'd have made sure he stayed invested. According to the book, Medallion has averaged 66% a year since 1988.

The one I keep thinking about is Berlekamp. He wasn't wrong about the method. He's the one who fixed it. He was just wrong about how far it could go, and the guy who believed more kept everything. In fairness, for every Simons there are plenty of founders who held on with total belief and lost it all. Most of these guys weren't dumb, they just bet on the odds.

Has anyone here sold out of something too early? Or held on way too long? 

I've been thinking about this question while researching an idea for a YouTube documentary.

Every business faces market changes over time. Customer preferences change, new technologies emerge, competitors enter the market, and sometimes the entire industry changes.

But if these challenges affect almost every business, why do only a few manage to survive for 100 years or more?

Is it mainly because of good leadership, the ability to adapt, strong brand loyalty, financial stability, or something else?I'd like to understand what actually separates businesses that survive for generations from those that disappear within a few decades.

For those who have studied business history or have experience running a business, what do you think is the biggest factor?