GENTLEMAN SPECULATOR

The Book of Elon

A Conversation with Eric Jorgenson

Episode Date April 8, 2026 ·  Andrew Flattery, Host

Eric Jorgenson returned to Gentleman Speculator to talk about The Book of Elon, his attempt to distill Elon Musk's most useful ideas into a single readable volume, the way he did for Naval Ravikant. We get into why he refuses to hedge, how editing a scattered speaker differs from editing a crisp one, the 2008 story of Musk splitting his last dollars between SpaceX and Tesla, and the engineering discipline Eric now applies to his own company: question requirements, delete, simplify, accelerate, automate.

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All opinions expressed by Andrew Flattery and his guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Flattery Wealth Management, a registered investment advisor. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be relied upon as investment, tax, or legal advice. Clients of Flattery Wealth Management may maintain positions in Bitcoin and the securities discussed in this podcast.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Lightly edited for clarity.

FROM A BORROWED CLOSET TO TWO MILLION COPIES

Andrew Flattery: Eric Jorgenson, good to see you. Thanks for joining the podcast.

Eric Jorgenson: Thank you for having me back.

Andrew Flattery: How have you been? I was just saying, we got together in 2020 in the West Bottoms, and a lot has changed with you. Last time we met, you were recording in a borrowed closet. Now you've got this place. You've been flourishing.

Eric Jorgenson: Thank you. The reality is it's always harder to record in person. It's much easier to just do a Zoom, and I haven't done the video yet.

Andrew Flattery: Us speaking in person is really nice, actually. I've followed you from a distance, being a longtime subscriber to the email list and the Smart Friends podcast. Just so the listeners understand, give us the quick and dirty of your last six years. When we got together, you hadn't even put out the Naval book yet, which I have here on my desk. And I heard you say recently that you've either sold or distributed over two million copies of that thing. So you've been up to a lot.

Eric Jorgenson: That book kind of took on a life of its own. When I published it, my grandest hope was to sell a few thousand copies and break even. I thought Naval fans would love it. I'm still shocked to this day that it caught on as a word of mouth phenomenon. Forty languages. It's hard to know exactly with that many, but we're coming up on two million if we haven't crossed it already. And we've given away probably five million more digital. Everybody who's accessed it over the years, it's been unbelievable.

Andrew Flattery: This is going to be your biggest one, I feel. Naval is a niche subject, whereas Elon is, I don't know, is he the most well known person in the world?

Eric Jorgenson: Potentially. Honestly, maybe. Probably top ten. It is crazy. I don't have to explain who Elon is, which is a thing I did a lot with Naval. But that Naval book is really about wealth and happiness, which are universal human desires. So maybe I shouldn't be so surprised that it spread.

PUTTING THE WHOLE DEBATE ASIDE

Andrew Flattery: What I wanted to say first off about The Book of Elon is that I appreciate the way it's presented. I don't see you doing the management consulting thing where you feel obligated to hedge. You're not saying, listen, I don't agree with everything he says, I know he's complicated. You're just saying, this guy has given me a lot of value and I want to share it with the world. I don't feel like that book is out there. Maybe you got that from Elon, who has a way of presenting things in a very optimistic way. I find it refreshing. You're not hedging, but you're also not pure fanboying. I think you are a bit of a fanboy, but I like the way you're doing it. You're skipping all that stuff and just saying, here are all the valuable things I found. What do you think?

Eric Jorgenson: I just put the whole debate aside. We all disagree with each other about something. You go around the world and you decide whether to learn from somebody or fight about the things you disagree with. You have overlap and non-overlap with every single other human alive. It's one of the great graces and beauties that we can learn from anybody, interact with anybody. Or you can focus on the things that divide you and always find something to fight about. I just choose to be the former, to put the former out into the world, try to help people and see the best in others. Part of it is that I don't have a journalistic background. I'm not writing a biography. I'm not coming into this trying to be comprehensive. That's not how I judge my own work. My goal is to put as many useful ideas on the page as possible from a person who has lived an incredibly unique experience and has a lot to teach. It's true that I don't agree with him on everything, of course, but there's a lot he can share and teach, and a lot of important virtues and values that he embodies, that he's almost become a symbol of. Those are really what I want to convey. It's easy to conflate the man and the symbol, and I think it's helpful to try to separate the two, to understand which one you're appreciating at any given time.

Andrew Flattery: Well said.

NAVAL SPEAKS IN ESSAYS; ELON IS SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

Andrew Flattery: I remember when we got together six years ago, I was riffing on your idea: this is actually brilliant, you're taking the best of this guy's work. At the time, it was largely Twitter you were using as the source material for The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. But Naval is very articulate. He's good at putting his ideas out there and telling you what he thinks. I don't think Elon's like that at all. He's more erratic, all over the place. I follow Elon on Twitter, I occasionally listen to him on podcasts, but you coherently putting this together was actually very useful for me. So how is that process different from someone like Naval, who seems like he's almost serving it up for you? Obviously you still have to compile it, whereas with Elon it seems like it would be totally different.

Eric Jorgenson: Somebody once described Naval as speaking in essays, which I thought was a great description, and it's true. Naval is really crisp, really clear, really well distilled. Super high signal to noise ratio. With Elon, there is incredible signal in there, but there's also a lot of noise, as you say. I don't think he's as polished a speaker. He's kind of stilted, a little awkward sometimes. He's not a charismatic delivery guy like Steve Jobs was. He's not renowned for his presentation skills. But there is incredible substance in there, and I hope that by organizing and really thorough editing, the clarity of the thinking, which is actually there, comes through. You don't accomplish the things he does without an extreme clarity of thought, a powerful understanding of the true nature of things, and a level of incisiveness that is better than it's conveyed, for the most part, by him. I've had people give me the feedback of, I knew he had good ideas, but they emerge much more clearly in writing. In extremely well-edited writing that still tries to be true to his voice. That's what I was shooting for. Every single word of his book comes from him: public transcripts, public interviews, all public sources. There's a cited version on the site. You can go back and see the original of anything in there. And I do edit pretty heavily for clarity and conciseness. There are a lot of things that change between speaking and writing that you have to get right so it feels right when you're reading it. But I hope the clarity of thought emerges as a pleasant reading experience that still feels like he's speaking directly to you.

Andrew Flattery: You shared something with me earlier about a retweet, maybe. Permission. Did you need it? Did you seek it? How does that whole process work?

GETTING THE THUMBS UP

Eric Jorgenson: I did get his permission for this. He did not read the final manuscript and approve it, that's not it. But when I was maybe halfway through, and I'd been working on his work for about five years, I didn't really talk about it publicly until I had permission, in I think 2024. Once I knew I had something good, it was a V3 but we'll call it a V1 that I felt proud to put in front of him, I said, look, I've been working on this. I've already put in this number of years and hours. Here's a current version. I'm not saying it's done, but at a concept level this is what I'm trying to accomplish. Can I just get a thumbs up? I'm not asking for access, I'm not asking for anything. All I want to know is that you're not going to be mad about it, that you approve of the project at a concept level. A thumbs-up emoji. I got connected through Brent Beshore to Sam Teller, his former EA, who was his right-hand man through all the crazy years of Model 3 production and the Tesla scale-up. Sam very generously said, yeah, I'll put this project in front of him and get a yes or no.

Andrew Flattery: Can we just say, Brent Beshore, a Missouri guy, by the way.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Columbia, Missouri. Permanent Equity.

Andrew Flattery: That's terrific. I heard Sam Teller speak at Capital Camp, actually. Brent Beshore had him out, that's how I knew they were connected in the first place. Amazing stories. He had a quote that stuck with me, which seems appropriate for somebody who followed Elon Musk around for years: you can only conceive of the level of excellence you've personally experienced.

Eric Jorgenson: That's a pretty good observation.

Andrew Flattery: Your podcast is called Smart Friends. One of the things that's underrated about Elon is that he's pretty good at relationships for a guy you wouldn't think would be. I don't know the whole story about the falling out that happened at times with the PayPal Mafia, but he eventually made amends with the Peter Thiels of the world. And he's even mended his relationship with Trump, which seemed like it would be impossible. It seems like a guy like that would be hard to get along with, and yet somehow he's able to get people to follow him.

Eric Jorgenson: He's extremely inspiring, and he's clear. If you're going to go work at an Elon Musk company, you're going to get pushed to your absolute limit. It's the place that smart, ambitious, purpose-driven people go to get the most out of themselves, to turn themselves over to that experience for at least a period of their life. And thank God that exists. For all the people who have a moral judgment of, oh, he's pushing his people too hard, they choose to be there. They applied for the job. If you want to work four hours a week, find a place where you work four hours a week. If you want to work a hundred hours a week, make way more money and accomplish something, be part of a great mission, you go work at one of these companies. Isn't it great that we have that choice? Thank God for capitalism.

THE GREATEST LIVING ENTREPRENEUR

Andrew Flattery: Your dedication of the book is for your progeny, I think. One of the major themes is this great man of history idea, this inspirational great man idea. I heard you say on a podcast, Elon's the greatest living entrepreneur. And I thought, is that true? Let me see if I can rebut that or provide the alternative. The only thing I could come up with is, well, I use Bezos's products every day. I use the Kindle and Audible, I use Amazon products every single day, whereas Elon's products, I do not. However, I'm not telling my son Henry stories about how Bezos invented the Kindle. I am telling him stories about how they're going to drive the Cybertruck on the moon. So I don't think I have anything to rebut. I think you're right. Nobody's done what he's done. Maybe there's an argument for Bezos, but I'm not telling my kids stories about Jeff Bezos.

Eric Jorgenson: That's an interesting observation. If I had to defend it, social networks would have happened without Zuckerberg. He built the biggest and best one, but they would have existed. Search engines existed before Larry and Sergey. E-commerce would have been great and existed without Jeff Bezos. Bezos is an incredible operator, and probably the only other candidate. In fifty years, Blue Origin might turn into as consequential a company as SpaceX, and they may look similar. But I think Elon is a little more inspiring in terms of the sacrifices, the personal risks, and how hard he keeps driving. It's easy to forget now that in 2002, when these companies were essentially started, how far off the map both SpaceX and Tesla were. He wasn't continuing to compound. He put his entire two-hundred-million-dollar net worth and his public reputation back on the table to go all in on both of these things at essentially the same time, when everybody thought he was crazy for attempting either one. And he did both. He made both happen. Both of those categories exist and changed the whole trajectory of multiple industries. The other thing to be said, on him being the greatest, is that he's still stacking S-curves. Amazon does great for all of us every day, but I don't know where the next S-curve is for Amazon. AWS is an incredible one. Drone delivery might be another, but it feels like they backed off that. Tesla is moving back in their supply chain into lithium refining, expanding into humanoid robots, moving into grid battery and solar. They're building a fab. A Terafab was just announced last week, as we're recording this. They may become the biggest chip producer in the world, by an order of magnitude, we'll see. And then SpaceX, of course. I think Starship functionally works now. They just keep blowing them up on purpose to see how awesome they can make it. Going to build a mass driver on the moon, get us to Mars, start to build this sort of Dyson sphere, space compute. These things seem far-fetched, but when you realize the future is arriving faster every day, and you get an appreciation for the recursive, compounding, exponential nature of technology and how it feeds back into itself, things that seem like they should be year 2500 could very well be year 2075, which hopefully you and I will live to see. If you're doing a venture investment on a twenty-year time horizon, you want to work backwards into what a mega-cap company is going to be, which is one of my hobbies. You've got to account for that.

Andrew Flattery: Interesting. Me being the armchair guy, observing on Twitter, I think Bezos is living his best life, and maybe there's something to be said for that too. And he got jacked. But what did you call it, S-curve stacking. So he's trying to think about the next growth trajectory of the businesses, whereas Amazon is much more mature at this point. The core e-commerce business is, and AWS probably is as well.

Eric Jorgenson: SpaceX is a really easy way to see it, because you had the first Falcon 1 and then Falcon 9. Once Falcon 9 was reusable, he could have never built another product, and it could have been one of the greatest cash flow businesses of all time. But before it was even clear, he was already saying, nope, next is Starship, we're going to Mars. That comes from this purpose-driven nature. So many people, especially in finance, because the whole lens of the world becomes money, ascribe a wrong theory of mind to Elon. They say, why would he start a car company, that's so low ROI, so capital intensive. He's not trying to make money. This is one of the great paradoxes of life: the richest man alive does not care about money, and has actually made a whole lot of deeply insane decisions from a financial perspective.

THE BEST FINANCIAL DECISIONS ARE NOT FINANCIAL DECISIONS

Eric Jorgenson: David Senra has one of his maxims: the best financial decisions are not financial decisions. That's so hard to fully internalize. There are so many people well advanced in their career, whether creatively, as entrepreneurs, or even as investors, who say, I really started to make money when I started ignoring it and doing the work for its own sake. It made the work more unique, more purpose-driven, more energized, and it turns out they made more money doing that than when they agonized over the dollars.

Andrew Flattery: It's an argument that capitalism is still alive, because the rebuttal could be, plenty of people make money that don't deserve it, because we have this fake economy. That's not the case with Elon. He invented new categories. There was basically no rent-seeking to do these things he's done.

Eric Jorgenson: It's the reverse of rent-seeking. People forget, in the early SpaceX days, the whole aerospace industry was working on cost-plus contracts. So he was incentivized to use the whole budget, blow the timeline, and go over budget. That's how Lockheed and Boeing worked. He came in and said, no, I want an outcome-based contract. I want to take the risk of not delivering. I want to put my teams' backs against the wall and be forced to make this work. I don't want you to pay me if I don't deliver a thing that's never been delivered before. Again, as a taxpayer, thank God. What an incredible innovation.

Andrew Flattery: One of the main themes of the book is respect for the makers. I put on my Amazon review the quote where he said there are too many smart people in finance. I like that quote because it's a little self-deprecating, for me to acknowledge it. I think the end of the quote is, America used to make things. It's a soul-searching thing. Are you going to encourage your son to study engineering? Is that one of the lessons of this book? But I also know you're an investor, at least one of the hats you wear. So how do you take that comment? Elon explicitly likes to say he's not an investor, he likes to shirk that. There's a little tension there. How do you think about it?

Eric Jorgenson: There are a lot of ways to think about it. It is weird, and many people have commented on this, I'm not the first, but something like ten percent of our economy or more is the financial sector, and energy is like three percent by market cap, which is pretty weird. Energy is the fundamental cost and bottleneck of all things, and the financial engineering layer on top of that should be working to add value, not capture it. The value-capture mechanisms of finance are a little high. He's also critical of law, it's not just finance. There are more referees. But I try not to use the word should, and I don't ever tell anybody what to do. Nobody ever changes their mind anyway. So the audience of that comment, and that highlight, is certainly not forty-year-old families who should throw it all away and go get an engineering degree. If you do, more power to you, rock on. But that's really for eighteen-year-olds, people choosing their major, people choosing what career or industry to focus on. My literal mission statement for this book is one million Musks. I want to see the next generation value engineering, value producing new products, value driving the cost of products down, and see the good that happens for humanity and for everyone involved when you pursue that. Tesla, as far as I can tell, is alone among car companies in intentionally pursuing lower prices for their products. They're actively lowering the price of the Model 3, actively lowering the cost of the Cybertruck. As volume rises, they can maintain the same margins and lower prices, which means more people buy them, which means volume goes up, which means they can lower it more. That comes from the mission orientation: we want as many people as possible driving electric cars. If you go forty years back and look at a Ford F-150, the thing used to cost like five grand. Inflation-adjusted, today it should cost fifteen thousand. I might be getting the math wrong, but the base model is like forty grand now. Every other car company is trying to make as much money as possible, raise the prices. Yes, the product is more complex, more safety features, but it's not three times better than it was thirty years ago. It's the same basic amount of metal. Why is the cost of living of so many things going up? It's partly a values problem, partly an incentives problem. Elon embodies something beautiful here: make an exceptional product, drive the cost of it down, get it to as many people as possible, and start with a really grand, species-level mission to the extent possible.

IN THE LIMIT, EVERYONE IS AN ENGINEER

Eric Jorgenson: There's a great quote, I think it was the Cheeky Pint podcast he went on recently, where he said, in the limit, everyone is an engineer. And Naval has a similar idea.

Andrew Flattery: Say that again?

Eric Jorgenson: In the limit. One of the tools he uses is to max any variable and do the thought experiment. Naval has a thought experiment that explains the quip. Imagine a maximally educated population. Imagine we had eight billion people who all somehow magically had a master's degree and ten years of practical knowledge in software engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, physics, biology, robotics. Everyone was a genius-level hacker, deeply resourceful. What problems would remain? Eight billion perfectly educated geniuses. We'd have cured cancer, we'd have incredible robotics, abundant energy, abundant water, abundant food. As Elon likes to say, there's no fundamental law-of-physics reason we can't have that. We're just getting in our own way. So in the limit, everyone is an engineer means that if we had a perfectly optimized society, almost everyone would be building new things that solve problems, incredibly efficient things. There are whole categories of things, and roles, that would just not exist. It's a little fanciful, but to your question of whether I encourage people to be engineers, I think so. My model of the world is that the frontiers of human knowledge are science and entrepreneurship, and almost everybody else is working on the core, the maintenance engine of humanity. The people working to advance and expand human knowledge usually fall into one of those categories, and maybe that's an oversimplification, they blend together. But through the David Deutsch view of the world, new knowledge is all that matters. Entrepreneurs are instantiating that new knowledge in products, scientists are discovering new things about the universe, and artists are trying to discover and express new things about the human experience. Engineers are blending the scientific breakthroughs with the new entrepreneurial opportunities: take a new understanding of the universe, package it into a product, and extend it out to billions.

THE MERITOCRACY TRAP AND THE CASE FOR WARTIME

Andrew Flattery: You reminded me of this book, The Meritocracy Trap, by a Yale law professor. Have you come across it? It's not a new idea. This guy is probably on the political left, but he's observing something we all kind of understand: the gutting of the middle class. He describes a trajectory like Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, where you've got the rich oligarchs, essentially no middle class, and then a permanent underclass. He's saying that's the trajectory we've been on. His point is that the previous iteration of aristocracy was the leisure class, with the underclass being the laborers, and that's now inverted. Now you've got an underclass of people who actually don't work, and maybe AI is going to take away a lot of these middle-class jobs. Then you've got the Elons of the world, hyper-efficient workers who can amplify themselves a hundred times, a thousand times. All the value is accruing to these elite aristocrats who actually work quite hard and are quite good at what they do. My point is, that's an observation, there's no value judgment in there. Maybe your book is an encouragement for some of these people who want to break out of the underclass, or who are worried about the dissolution of the middle class. You could say, well, Elon works too hard and it's bad for work-life balance. Elon needs that advice, but maybe people aspiring to be like him could stand to work a sixty- or seventy-hour, or God forbid a hundred-hour week. He talks about this in the book. I've never done that, by the way. But in a season of life. Elon's always in wartime, and I think all of us should have wartime at some point in our life.

Eric Jorgenson: That's good encouragement. This is an overused word, but it's one I keep finding myself using: Elon is authentically him. It's a very absurd way to go through life to think that however you choose to live, other people should also want to live. If you really are happy working forty hours a week, the fact that you need to go express that Elon is working too hard and should be doing something else, you don't know what's going on in his head. You don't know his genetics, his base energy level. You don't know what his childhood was. You don't know the mission he's on. You don't know the demons in his head. He's, as you said, wired for war. Even when things are going great, he finds a thing to go to war over. He'll create a problem. He's just him.

Eric Jorgenson: The risk of writing a book like this is that people think I'm saying they should do this, and I'm not. I don't care what you do. Do the thing that feels right to you. Be yourself. This is a collection of puzzle pieces. Most people will read this book and take one to ten useful ideas out of it, this puzzle piece resonates with me, I'm going to install it in my head and apply it to my life and my life will be better. Thank you for spending five hours reading a book that gave you an idea you can use for the rest of your life. No one is going to pick it up and be able to do what Elon Musk does, because he's a maniacal genius with a unique background who started these companies twenty-five years ago. So the tongue-in-cheek one million Musks is very much, don't go be Elon Musk. Be your own version of Elon Musk's level of ambition, drive, ambition-orientation, purity of intent. That's what I hope.

Andrew Flattery: Is it in your book where he said you should just follow the thing you're interested in? When people ask Elon for advice, he doesn't say go into engineering, he actually just says pursue what gets you excited, what gets you amped up.

Eric Jorgenson: I think those are both good things. There's a whole section in the book, more than a chapter, about the value of engineering, because I think it's underemphasized and has been. The pendulum has swung away from it in the US, back to finance and law.

Andrew Flattery: When I graduated from college, people did tell me, don't go into law, we don't need any lawyers. But nobody said that about investment banking. Now, fifteen years after the '08 crisis, people would say that about investment banking, and it's become fashionable to say it about MBAs. We don't need MBAs. It's difficult to fully appreciate, but I imagine America in the '40s and '50s, the social credit went to the builders, the manufacturers, the engineers. People went to work in factories and built stuff at the end of the day. America's been in a position to export the dollar and our finance industry, to work from a laptop shop, and I say that as somebody with a work-from-a-laptop shop, so I'm aware of the contradiction. But the pendulum is swinging, for national security reasons and for a better understanding of where value comes from. The last twenty years of returns in the stock market and tech have been software, and I think AI is going to swing that pendulum back.

Eric Jorgenson: That wasn't software-started, by the way. It was Genentech, and the original chip companies, the Intel guys from Iowa. I always like to emphasize that.

Andrew Flattery: Midwest supremacy. There's that Tom Wolfe article, have you read it, about the guys from Grinnell College who helped found Silicon Valley. Iowa farm boys. So I want you to tell the story about Elon going all in in 2008, where he basically split his final dollars between two companies.

TWO MISSIONS, FORTY MILLION DOLLARS, ONE CHRISTMAS EVE

Eric Jorgenson: This is the story that best characterizes Elon Musk. If you're only going to know one thing about him, this story exemplifies his values, his insane risk tolerance, and his dedication to his missions. In 2008, he's maybe six years into both SpaceX and Tesla. He made two hundred million dollars from the sale of PayPal and started SpaceX and Tesla at roughly the same time. He didn't start Tesla, he was the main funder and heavily involved as a co-founder and chairman, with product opinions the whole way through. There's a whole deep, messy part of the history, but the critical part is he had taken over as CEO in late 2007, early 2008. Tesla was in a very bad spot. Their first product, the Roadster, had a negative net margin on a product basis and hardly sold. They lost money on it. They were out of money. The Model S was not yet out for sale. If they did not fundraise effectively, immediately, the refunds alone would have bankrupted the company. It would have collapsed. At the same time, he had put about a hundred million into SpaceX to fund three launches. His proposition was, if we can't make orbit in three launches, we deserve to fail. A hundred million is gone, three strikes and you're out. And they had just failed their third launch. So both companies looked like they were going to fail. He had funded both himself, was trying to lead both in parallel, and he's down to, if you can imagine, his last forty million, trying to figure out what to do. He describes it as feeling like he's holding a kid in each hand, trying to figure out which one to let go of off a cliff. He says, I couldn't bring myself to let either one die and put all the money into the other, because these are both such critical missions. So he does the thing that is maximally risky for his reputation and his money, but gives both missions even the slimmest chance of success. To me this exemplifies his comic-book, sci-fi-hero thinking. He's like, I'll take the longest odds, I don't care how long they are, I'll take the path that gives me the greatest chance of mission success. So he splits the money. He funds the fourth launch of SpaceX with the scraps they have in the warehouse. You have six weeks. Go back to the island, build the fourth rocket. They had a hunch there was a small change they could make to get the fourth launch to work, and it worked. The next day they get a call from NASA with a contract, and SpaceX is saved. That was December 2008. At the same time, Tesla's swirling the drain. The main investor was going AWOL. This is the middle of the 2008 financial crash. GM had just filed for bankruptcy. Nobody was lending, let alone to a car startup, let alone to an electric car startup. His biggest investor was ghosting everybody. A combination of Steve Jurvetson and Antonio Gracias basically said they'd match whatever he put in. That's when he put in the entire remainder of his net worth. It was Christmas Eve at six p.m., the last hour of the last day possible. He puts in his money, the other investors come in, they make payroll the day after Christmas and start to ship Roadsters. And it works. It starts to work, and that becomes the early inflection point for Tesla. How many entrepreneurs do you know who would risk two hundred million dollars? They make it to a nine-figure net worth, they're well-renowned, and they risk every dollar and their public reputation on the narrowest possible path. Not just two good options, which would have been wider paths to partial success, where he still would have been one of the wealthiest and greatest entrepreneurs. But that's the story that to me is, I don't know who else is crazy enough to do that. It's literally a John Galt thing, an Ayn Rand thing.

Andrew Flattery: We're in your office right now. When I was in Colorado, my old office was on Pearl Street in Boulder, and on the same street there was a wonderful restaurant that was Kimball Musk's.

Eric Jorgenson: His brother.

Andrew Flattery: Kimball Musk, yeah. I think he was involved in Zip2, had an exit, became a master chef and started a restaurant, and it was wonderful. I don't know anything about him, but I imagine he lived a quiet life in Colorado and was living his best life too. That's the other direction this could have gone. But obviously Elon did not take that direction. Going all in, at least three or four times.

Eric Jorgenson: Chips back on the table. He continues to double down.

Andrew Flattery: This gets back to your point about him not thinking of himself as an investor, not having a financial goal. He just wants to use the money to build the next thing. Once you have a bunch of money, you're like, what am I going to do with this? You've got to invest it somewhere. You could just leave it in the stock market, I guess.

Eric Jorgenson: Elon has been a great inspiration, and Naval has talked about this. Naval made it early in crypto, invested in hundreds of companies through AngelList, super successful. He could have sat back and done nothing. Naval credits Elon with inspiring him to get back in the arena. So Naval started a new company, the Impossible Computer Company. There's not much public about it yet. But Naval had this realization, seeing Elon, that life is best lived in the arena. There are plenty of people who, once they make it, sit on a beach.

Andrew Flattery: I think I maybe heard that on your podcast. Didn't he say AI has really been an impetus for him to try new things and get back to building again?

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, because, going back to the thought experiment you mentioned a few minutes ago, anyone is capable of anything now. If you have enough curiosity and energy to ask the next question, you have an absolutely tireless genius at your fingertips. The difference now between the potential of a perfectly educated population and the one we have is just who has enough energy to keep going.

WHAT CHANGED AFTER THE ELON DEEP DIVE

Andrew Flattery: Your friend David Senra talks about how, reading founder biographies, he'll take the tidbits and try to implement them in his life and business, changing his behavior. In your Elon deep dive, has any of this changed the way you go about your life or your businesses? What's different now after going down the Elon rabbit hole?

Eric Jorgenson: The most universal one is just speed, how he uses time. Do the most important thing immediately. Most people could name that, yes he works hard, yes he acts quickly, yes he uses first-principles, in-the-limit thinking. But what's not commonly appreciated is that those habits multiply each other's effectiveness. If you're working on the right thing, at the right time, immediately, at high volume, your returns are a hundred thousand, ten thousand times what someone doing the wrong thing at the wrong time slowly in small volume is doing. When you do that over twenty years, of course you have a massive gap in outcomes. Some people aren't ten thousand times smarter, but they're working in such a way that they accomplish orders of magnitude more. That's the most useful thing. Elon's a genius, but the dynamic range of human IQ is two to three times, not a thousand times. What separates the outliers among outliers is that they find habits that multiply, not just stack.

THE ALGORITHM

Eric Jorgenson: The algorithm is so useful. I run a publishing company, and I'm teaching my executive team the algorithm: question requirements, delete, optimize, accelerate, automate.

Andrew Flattery: I don't follow. What do you mean by the algorithm?

Eric Jorgenson: The algorithm is Elon's rigorous five-step engineering process. It's an outcome of him living on the factory floor at Tesla and trying to scale Model 3 production. The massive mistake he made, a ten-billion-dollar mistake at the Fremont plant when they first launched the Model 3, is that he tried to automate everything. We're going to have the most automated factory in the world. What he realized after a few years of battle is that automating is actually the last step. So the five-step process he has all his engineers think through, that he organizes his teams around and trains people on, he calls the algorithm, in caps. The first step is to question every requirement. You frame the problem first, and the problem comes with regulations, requirements from your legal department, your HR department, customer requests, a different engineering department. The first step is to make your requirements less dumb. You run around and get rid of as many as you can. Every requirement has to come with one single human name attached. You question requirements to break as many as possible, so you have the biggest possible solution space. Step two is to delete any part or process you can. Try very hard to delete it, because simplicity delivers both reliability and low cost. The more parts you can combine or delete, the more elegant the system, the fewer things you have to worry about, the fewer things that can come apart. That's a long explanation, but it's all in the book. Third is simplify and optimize. Fourth is move faster, once you've got the right thing, as simple as you can, optimized, go faster. And the fifth, finally, once you know everything is right and moving as fast as it can, automate it. He says, I have made the mistake of going backwards on every single step in that process many, many times. I've tried to automate something, then tried to make it move faster, then tried to optimize it, then ended up deleting it because the requirements were wrong.

Andrew Flattery: You've got to tell the toy casting story.

THE TOY TESLA AND THE GIGA PRESS

Eric Jorgenson: On that note. Elon is always looking to adjacent industries, always thinking, this goes back to thinking in the limit, what's the maximum possible, the best possible solution? What are the actual laws of physics limiting this process, and how close can we get to what's theoretically perfect? He was playing with a toy Tesla, looking at the bottom of it, trying to figure out how to solve an engineering problem for a full-size Tesla. The bottom of the toy is just cast in one piece. If you look at a Matchbox car, the whole bottom is cast in one piece. He's looking at this three-dollar toy, they make millions of them, it's very detailed. How do they make this? They use a gigantic casting machine that makes a bunch of them at once. He said, how big are the casting machines? Can we get a casting machine that can cast the whole bottom of the car? They said, that would be bigger than any casting machine that's ever existed. He's like, what laws of physics would limit a casting machine that big? Well, I guess none. This is always the conversation: well, that doesn't exist, so it's not possible. He's like, I know the laws of physics aren't limiting it. He asks these questions to evoke thought: what would it take? I know it hasn't been done before, but is it possible? Yes? Okay, what would it take to get it done? So they went and asked the six biggest casting-machine companies in the world. Five said no, one said maybe, and he said, great, I'll take that as a yes, go build it. Historically, the back of the car, the chassis, has been I don't know how many parts, probably twenty different parts attached with a hundred different bolts. You look under your car and see all these things hodgepodged together. But if you can cast it all as one part, you go from hundreds of parts and installation processes and different metals and potential bottlenecks to one hunk of steel that's just cast and passed on. The part count, the risk of something coming apart, the number of steps that have to be taken to produce that car, all go down dramatically. It's this thing of, over and over again, trying to innovate new ways to delete parts.

Eric Jorgenson: If you haven't seen the three Raptor engines, V1, V2, and V3, from SpaceX next to each other, you've seen that meme online, stop what you're doing and Google it right now, because this is the visualization that will go down in history as the image of SpaceX. The first V1 of the Raptor engine looks like an unbelievable, chaotic spaghetti mess of engineering, all pipes and tubes and wires and knobs and crazy stuff on it. V2 is dramatically simpler. And V3 looks like a completely different product, because it's so lean and so simple it looks like it can't possibly integrate all the different things he wanted. That's part of this system of deleting. There's probably a hundred thousand parts in that first engine, maybe a thousand in the final one. We're probably talking about two orders of magnitude, I'm making up rough numbers, but it's an unbelievable example of how simple things can be when you're rigorous about it. He said go ultra-hardcore on deletion and simplification. You can read the emails of him just sending all-caps DELETE, anything you possibly can. He has a really helpful quote on this: if you're not adding back ten percent of what you delete, you're not deleting enough. We have such an inherent bias against just-in-case, fail-proof things, because we're all afraid to have a fragile process. We're afraid to lose an email, or not respond to a client, or miss an important note and get fired. So we over-engineer so many things just in case, but that ends up being deeply inefficient in the long run, because we have all these redundancies and much more complex systems. It's very inspiring and freeing. I felt this as the CEO of my publishing company, Scribe. We delete a part or a process, and nothing changes, and everything is still done. You delete it and you feel lighter, like you just lost a pound with no effort. You're like, oh my God, I saved money, I simplified something, nothing is different about the experience, and everything moves faster because there's one less thing to worry about. It is addition by subtraction, and it feels like magic. So many people just never focus on trying to delete or simplify.

BEATING JAMES CLEAR

Andrew Flattery: It's really inspiring. Eric, I'm not a pop-business-book guy. I don't read all these books that are typically on the business charts. But you've got to beat James Clear. I don't know how James Clear is always number one.

Andrew Flattery: Is he the Atomic Habits guy? I saw he was ahead of you last time I looked.

Andrew Flattery: How does he keep selling books? Because habits are a meta-solution. Whatever your problem is as a human being, you can solve it with habits. He wrote an exceptionally good book.

Andrew Flattery: I've got to read it. I don't want to throw shade. He's killing it, obviously.

Eric Jorgenson: He spent years and years writing that book. And he's also spent years promoting the same product. How many authors of his stature have not written another book?

Andrew Flattery: Most authors write a book as a side project and then immediately move on to another thing. Tim Ferriss immediately moved on to other books. Morgan Housel immediately moved on to other books. It is the book of the decade, because James Clear is amazingly talented, hardworking, still going around speaking, still selling the same book, still willing to talk about the same thing ten years later, which most people aren't willing to do. He's an unbelievably good do-the-basics-consistently for a simple, useful product in a high-TAM thing. Simple genius. It is a Warren Buffett strategy, of authors. What I wanted to say is, I feel invested in your success, as a longtime admirer of your work and a Kansas City guy. I'm encouraged to see you break into the mainstream.

Eric Jorgenson: Thank you.

Andrew Flattery: It'd be really cool to see you up there with James Clear. Wish you the best. Where's the best place to go to buy it? Are we doing Amazon, or a local bookstore?

Eric Jorgenson: I would love for you to go to a local bookstore. Not all of them carry it. The math on getting into a local bookstore is tough, because they have twenty-five thousand SKUs and there are two million books published every year. But if you go to Bookshop.org, you can buy from a local bookstore at the same price as Amazon. It's a local-bookstore aggregator. So if you're a local-bookstore human like me, go to Bookshop.org, find my book, and buy it there. Of course, Amazon, super easy. Audible. It's in all the formats. You can go to Barnes & Noble or Target. But I also give away all the digital. If you're like, I kind of want to try it first, go to elonmuskbook.org and get all the links, read bonus chapters, subscribe to the email list. Try out the digital version, read a couple of chapters, see if you like it before you buy.

Andrew Flattery: I'm looking forward to seeing where the book goes. It's a great book, I highly recommend it. I saw friend of the pod Ryan O'Connor recommends it.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah.

Andrew Flattery: Ryan's a good buddy and an amazing guy. Great book, Eric. Good job.

Eric Jorgenson: Thank you so much.

Andrew Flattery: I hope it serves you, and I hope it serves the many people reading it as they make important decisions about what to dedicate their life to.

The Book of Elon distills Elon Musk's most useful ideas into his own words, the way Eric Jorgenson did for Naval Ravikant in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. You can find it on Amazon, at your local bookstore through Bookshop.org, or read it for free at elonmuskbook.org.

Gentleman Speculator is produced by Flattery Wealth Management.