The Goal of This Post

This post shares some of my favorite passages and ideas from The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgenson.

It’s a compact guide to Elon Musk’s way of thinking—grounded in truth-seeking, first-principles reasoning, engineering, and useful work. More than a biography, it’s a collection of mental models for building better things, solving harder problems, and thinking with greater rigor about the future.

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Obsess over Truth

• If you’re going to come up with a good solution, the truth is really, really important.
• You have to ask whether something is true or not.
• You need to be rigorous in your self-analysis.

Start somewhere. Then be prepared to question your assumptions, fix what you did wrong, and adapt to reality.

First-Principles Thinking

• The normal way we conduct our lives is reasoning by analogy.
• When you think this way, you only get slight iterations.
• For important things, that kind of thinking is too bound by convention or prior experiences.

Break something down to the most fundamental principles. Start by asking: What am I most confident is true at a foundational level? That sets your axiomatic base. Then you reason up from there. Then you check your conclusions against the axiomatic truths.

Thinking in Limits

• Take a particular idea and imagine scaling it to a very large or very small number.
• Let’s say we’re trying to figure out why a part or product is expensive.
• Is it because of something foolish, or just because production volume is too low?

If my team says something is impossible, I try to open their minds to new potential solutions by asking, “What would it take?”

Aspire to Be Less Wrong

• It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong.
• You want to believe things proportionate to the evidence. Not inversely proportional to the evidence.
• Develop good general knowledge, so you at least have a rough “lay of the land” of the full knowledge landscape.
• Read a broad range of material. Just read. Try to ingest as much information as you can.

Talk to people from different walks of life, in different industries, professions, and skills. Try to learn as much as possible. Search for meaning.

Engineering Is Magic

• When I asked for an explanation, I got the true explanation of how things work.
• Without engineering, you do not have any new data. You hit a limit.
• If you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. The limiting factor is the engineering.

Science is discovering the essential truths about what exists in the universe. Engineering is about creating things that have never existed before.

Engineering Wins Wars

• When there’s a rapid change in the rate of technology, engineering plays a pivotal role.
• If there is a big difference in the technologies—the side with the advanced technology will win.
• What really matters is the pace of innovation.

When the rate of change of technology is high enough, or there is a big technological difference between one side and the other, then that technology dominates and you get a lopsided victory.

Engineering Creates Value

• Innovation is not the problem. Execution is the problem.
• You only build value in a company if you do hard work to solve tough problems.
• The execution of good ideas is extremely difficult.

Prototypes are easy; production is hard. Production and being cash-flow positive is excruciating pain. Product ideas are nearly irrelevant.

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All content credit goes to the author(s). I’ve shared the bits I’ve enjoyed the most and found most useful.

Cheers, till next time! Saludos!
Alberto