HACKER Q&A
📣 quietthrow

What is it like to work with Elon Musk


Given today, a natural curiosity remerges - how does he accomplish what he accomplishes!? Running one company and changing an industry is hard. Doing that in parallel for another industry is just incomprehensible for a layman. Would love to get people’s perspective who have worked for him/ with him.

If one Elon Musk can do this what if we had a hundred? Or a thousand? I think world needs to know how to be like him.

  👤 julianeon Accepted Answer ✓
I worked with a PM whose husband worked at SpaceX; he'd recently left. I checked his credentials; they were very, very impressive, far above my pay grade, and very qualified for any kind of aerospace job. On LinkedIn he seemed like he might qualify as a 'genius', or at any rate as a very educated person who would be a credit to any team. He'd reached management level.

He was a little jaded about it, and told a story that seems a little familiar from some other big names. According to him, SpaceX wasn't a great place to work, because they pushed their employees extremely hard and didn't pay true market rates. So when he jumped ship he immediately increased his pay by some impressive amount - I don't know, 25% (and he probably made a multiple of my salary going in). Bottom line: it was a bit like the games industry - why work yourself to death when you can work for a bank for more money for less work? There were other commercial space orgs doing good work, so he went to one of them for an instant upgrade.

I don't know if he met Elon or not, but Elon wasn't like striding among the rockets or anything, this guy's division had plenty of work and it sounded like they had their noses to the grindstone with or without Elon. (To be fair, this wasn't a criticism of Elon's leadership, just an observation about the day to day - work, work, work).

I wasn't privy to the details, so I don't know much the equity was worth (seems like it would be more now - this was circa 2015). But that was his take, consistent with that of some other big name companies, where the brand itself is a sort of 'reward' that makes up for shortcomings in other areas, like salary.

Disclaimer: I'm not this guy, I'm just reporting on his experience, as told secondhand by his wife. This is an accurate retelling of that assessment, not my own.

👤 rvz
Maybe you could ask George Hotz (geohot), as he already has worked closely with him? Both SpaceX and in-formerly Tesla for electronics and computer vision. [0]

> If one Elon Musk can do this what if we had a hundred? Or a thousand? I think world needs to know how to be like him.

The best person you can be is yourself.

[0] https://youtu.be/FIbvt4_InyU?t=224