Elon used to spend most of his time interviewing every Zip2 engineer

At SpaceX and Tesla, he used the same 2 questions from 1995

Today he has spotted the top performers for running his six multi-billion dollar companies using the exact questions

Test yourself with this🧵 Elon has always held an exceptionally high bar for hiring top talent at his companies.

He believes the output of a business is the vector sum of the people within it.

Either we get the best people in the world or we get whipped👇

Peter Thiel is a kingmaker in the shadows

He backed Trump in 2016 and now 7 of his ex-colleagues(JD Vance, David Sacks, Elon, Vivek) are running the US government

Once you understand how Thiel spots winners before anyone else, you'll build influential networks like no other🧵 Peter Thiel today is at the center of all talent in Trump's cabinet.

He has quietly built a Peter Thiel Cinematic Universe.

The kind of power that could transform the US government and Silicon Valley.

But how did Peter Thiel orchestrate this?

There’s speed of light, and there’s speed of Elon:

- xAI doubled to 200K NVIDIA Hopper GPUs
- Deployed 3200 satellites in 3 years
- Produced ~1.8M vehicles in 2024

Once you study how he does it, you'll understand how broken traditional ways of running a company are 🧵 What Elon and his team have achieved is superhuman

Jensen said this recently when discussing how the team built supercomputer Colossus

A supercomputer would normally take:
3 years to plan --> deliver the equipment --> 1 year to get it all working

It was done in about 19 days

The coolest company you've never heard of:

- $70B conglomerate that acquires 100 companies/year.
- On the way to produce 500 millionaire employees
- Acquired 1000+ companies to date.

Founder refuses any media interviews.
Here's a deep dive on how he does it🧵 Constellation software, a company like no other:

- Debuted in 1996 with a valuation of $70M (~ increased value by 100,000%)

- Generates a free cash flow of ~$1.6B on $8.4B in revenue

- Acquired 52 companies from Apr to Nov 2024.

Here's how Mark Leonard(founder) does it 👇

Elon Musk once said:

"If I make slightly better decisions, I could affect the outcome of my companies by a billion dollars."

The marginal value of his time is >$100M/hour.

Here's how Elon makes decisions and innovates 10x better than everyone else 🧵 From payments to electric cars to commercial space travel, Elon has disrupted every field he has entered.

Today he runs 6 billion dollar companies and every company has disrupted it's respective industries

Here's his 5-step process on how he does it👇

In 1958, Toyota was bleeding money in America, losing $500 on every car they sold.

By 1975, they'd conquered the US market as the #1 import brand.

Their secret?
It was so brilliantly simple, it became the blueprint Harvard Business School still studies today🧵 Toyota had just entered the US market in 1957 and was struggling to compete with giants like Ford and Chrysler

So much so that they their estimated losses in the initial 3 years were over $1.5M

They needed to improve:
- Efficiency
- Reduce defects
- Cut down on wasted resources

Is being a billionaire the ultimate goal?
Not when you ask actual billionaires.

Buffet believes money has no utility in front of time

Gates, Bezos, Branson – all after the same thing:
More time.

They have implemented systems that help them buy it.
Here's how🧵 1. Bill Gates

Early in his career, Bill memorized the license plates of every employee to keep tabs on them 😂.

He used to micromanage everything.

The result?
Microsoft was a high-stress environment because Bill drove others as hard as he drove himself

But then he learnt 👇

Nvidia keeps crushing because Jensen runs it unlike other CEOs:

- No 1:1s
- No 1 or 5-year plans
- No status reports
- 60 direct reports

Once you see why he does it, you can't unsee it

And it explains everything wrong with the traditional way of running a company🧵 Jensen points out the more direct reports the CEO has, the fewer layers in the company.

And when you have 60 people in the room who know what moves the needle for the company, it unleashes faster speed.

Elon runs six multi billion-dollar companies simultaneously (SpaceX, Tesla, X, xAI, Neuralink, and Boring Company)

Most founders can’t run one.

Walter Isaacson (who spent a year shadowing Elon and wrote his biography) explains ‘How Elon does it’ on a podcast

Thread 🧵 Elon doesn't juggle Tesla, X, SpaceX simultaneously, but rather in cycles of extreme focus.

Here's how he does it 👇

Apple was in dire straits when Steve Jobs came back as interim CEO in 1997.

Losing money, had a confusing product line, and struggling to compete in the market.

Here's what he changed to set Apple on a path of consistent growth, even long after his departure🧵 When Steve Jobs returned, Apple had just completed a fiscal year where they lost about $1 billion on $7 billion in revenue.

With Job's comeback the company went from losing $1.04 billion to turning a $309 million profit within a year.

But it wasn't achieved going easy...

In 2018, Sam Altman simultaneously managed YC(a $30B+ Startup Accelerator) , invested >$400M in startups on the side, and built the world’s best team of frontier AI researchers with Elon for Open AI.

His answer to ‘How do you get so much done?’ is powerful.

A thread 🧵 Sam boils down his ability to accomplish more to three things:

1. Focus
2. Personal Connections
3. Self Belief

Master these, and you'll unlock a new level of productivity and impact.

My friend Fabrice is a legendary angel investor with >$300M in exits.

He's invested in 1000+ companies such as SpaceX, Stripe, and Spotify.

He singlehandedly does more than most $1B VC funds. How?

Ruthless delegation of his personal tasks 👇🏻 You have 15 productive hours in a day.

If you free up 3 hours/day, you're freeing up

1 day every five days
one month every 5 months
one year every five years
one decade every 5 decades

But most people spend these hours in useless tasks.
Here's how 👇

1/ People often ask me:

"How can I best leverage an assistant?" 😬

Or

"What are all the things I should be delegating?" 😅

Delegation is the key to unlocking personal and professional growth, but the art is vastly misunderstood.

@AthenaGo exists to change this. 💪 2/ We decided we wanted to answer this question -- "what AND how should I be delegating?" -- more completely and powerfully than anyone has before.

So this week Athena is launching our library of delegation playbooks. 👨‍🎓

1/ Hiring execs is one of the highest leverage things you will do as a founder. It’s also the thing that founders most consistently mess up.

If you do it right, it will transform your trajectory. If you mess it up, it will set you back months or years — or worse. 2/ Here’s how to get it right:

medium.com/@swaaanson/hir…

Some highlights for the lazy web:

1/ Silicon Valley is good at covering the fundraises, the product launches, the acquisitions. 🍾 Those are important things but represent <0.1% of what building a company is about. 2/ So we wanted to pull back the curtain at Thumbtack and share the real story behind our new $150M fundraise (a lot of blood sweat & tears): thumbtack.com/blog/blood-swe…

1/ We recently celebrated a decade (!) of building Thumbtack so I’m sharing a few of the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

Zero to $1B - 8 Lessons Scaling a Startup: medium.com/@swaaanson/zer…

And for the lazy web, here's some highlights: 2/ A decade ago: I was sleeping in a closet at Thumbtack’s first house, which we pretended was an office. We had no customers, no product, no money (thus the closet).