Elon Musk: What top elites compete on are their mindset and mental strength.

In the past two days, I read *The Book of Elon* compiled by Eric Jorgenson, the author of *The Almanack of Naval Ravikant*. This book condenses Elon Musk's original remarks from public interviews, internal letters, Twitter posts and speeches over the past 20 years, and is divided into four core parts: Pursuing the Mission, Executing to the Limit, Building a Company, and Representing Humanity.

After setting aside grand narratives such as rocket launches, gigafactories, and interstellar colonization, you will find that *The Book of Elon* is a textbook about the underlying cognitive operating system (way of thinking) and the high-pressure anti-frustration energy field (mental strength).

In the first half of commercial competition, the competition is for opportunities, resources, industry trends and connections; but in the second half, all dividends disappear, and what you are competing for is nothing more than two things: the "way of thinking" that sees through the essence of things, and the "mental strength" that chews glass and stares straight into the abyss in the darkest hour.

Today, we will break down this book, hoping it will bring you inspiration.

I. Where do top entrepreneurs win?

When many entrepreneurs hit a growth bottleneck or face persistently high costs, their first reaction is often to learn from peers: "How does the industry leader do it?" "Who are the competitors' suppliers?" "What is the best practice among peers?"

But in Musk's view, the moment you start imitating "industry conventions", you have already given up the possibility of disruptive innovation.

*The Book of Elon* states: The vast majority of stagnation in business is not due to insufficient effort, but because the brain runs in the wrong thinking framework, using tactical diligence to cover up the laziness of underlying logic.

The way of thinking determines whether you can find a breakthrough path that others cannot see; mental strength determines whether you can reach the end on this path of near-death survival.

Without the right way of thinking, mental strength will only turn into blind and paranoid "reckless work", rushing wildly on the wrong path; without strong mental strength, no matter how sophisticated the thinking deduction is, it will collapse in the face of fear of three consecutive rocket explosions and broken capital chains.

How did Musk reshape his way of thinking?

II. 4 Hardcore Rules That Completely Shatter Empiricism

Musk's underlying thinking is completely built on physics and engineering. For entrepreneurs in a complex business environment, this way of thinking can be refined into four directly implementable cognitive tools:

1. First Principles and the "Idiot Index"

Humans naturally like to think by analogy, because analogy saves the most brainpower — others did it this way in the past, so I only make a small change on the basis of others. But analogical thinking can only produce minor iterations, not orders-of-magnitude leaps.

What Musk advocates is the "first principle" in physics: break things down to the most basic, indivisible objective truths (axioms), and then reason upward from there.

In *The Book of Elon*, this thinking is embodied as a sharp business indicator — the "Idiot Index".

Idiot Index = Total cost of a finished product ÷ Total market cost of raw materials contained in the finished product.

In 2002, when Musk was preparing to build rockets, the price of buying a rocket on the market was as high as 65 million US dollars.

If you follow analogical thinking, aerospace is originally an extremely expensive industry, which is very reasonable.

But Musk asked with the first principle: "What exactly is a rocket made of?" The answer is: aerospace-grade aluminum alloy, titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then he asked people to check the prices of these raw materials on the London Metal Exchange, and found that the total cost of all raw materials that make up the rocket only accounts for about 2% of the rocket's selling price.

Similarly, in the early days of SpaceX, they once inquired a supplier about a rocket engine nozzle cooling jacket, and the other party quoted 13,000 US dollars, while the steel raw material for manufacturing it only cost 200 US dollars.

Musk pointed out: If the "Idiot Index" of a part is very high (for example, the finished product price is 50 times the price of raw materials), it means that the current design scheme is extremely stupid, or the supply chain is full of inefficiency, monopoly premiums and historical burdens that have never been questioned.

What enlightenment does this give us?

Don't easily believe what suppliers or industry experts tell you that "this thing is inherently this expensive". Break down your products, services or customer acquisition processes into the most basic atomic units, and calculate its "Idiot Index". Any place with extremely high premium is the biggest gold mine where you can achieve "tenfold cost reduction" by restructuring design and self-developed processes.

2. Five-Step Work Method

Many enterprises are keen to carry out digital transformation, purchase ERP systems, and deploy automated equipment, trying to speed up existing processes. But in the "Extreme Execution" chapter of *The Book of Elon*, Musk says this is the most expensive mistake he has ever made.

Back then, when producing Model 3 at Tesla's Fremont Factory and Nevada Battery Factory, Musk fell into the trap of "over-automation", trying to replace manual labor with hundreds of expensive robots, which eventually led to a complete paralysis of the production line, and he had to personally dismantle a large number of robots.

From that "production hell", Musk summed up the famous "Five-Step Work Method" . He requires all executives and engineers to memorize it backwards, strictly follow the sequence, and never reverse it:

Step 1: Question every requirement.

Any requirement you receive, no matter how smart the person who put it forward is, essentially contains stupid elements. Requirements from "smart people" are the most dangerous, because no one dares to question them. More importantly, every requirement must be tied to a specific responsible person, never to a certain department.

Because departments do not think, when you find the specific person, you will often find that the rule was written casually five years ago for a problem that no longer exists.

Step 2: Delete parts and processes.

Cut it! Cut it! If after deletion, you are not forced to add back at least 10% of the content, it means you have not deleted fiercely enough. It is better to delete by mistake and then remedy it than to keep any redundant things.

Step 3: Simplify and optimize.

This step must come after the first and second steps. The fatal mistake that a smart engineer often makes is to desperately optimize something that should not have existed in the first place.

Step 4: Speed up the turnover.

Every process can be faster, but only after you are sure that the direction is correct, the redundancy has been eliminated and simplified, can you step on the accelerator.

Step 5: Automation.

Put automation in the last step. Do not deploy an automation system before the process is running smoothly, otherwise you are just using machines to magnify the mistakes ten thousand times.

You may wish to examine your own company: the weekly meetings you hold every week, the reimbursement forms approved layer by layer, the complex OKR assessment forms, the little-used functional modules in the products...

Are you busy optimizing and accelerating them, or do you have the courage to press the delete button directly?

Deletion is the highest level of cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

3. Extreme Deduction Thinking

In *The Book of Elon*, Musk shows another physics tool he uses to judge the essence of a business problem: extreme deduction (scaling the scale to infinity, or shrinking it to infinitesimal).

When engineers at Tesla or SpaceX complain that the cost of a certain part is too high, on the grounds that "the current procurement volume is too small to achieve economies of scale", Musk will immediately throw out an extreme question: "Assuming we produce 1 million pieces of this part every year now, will it still be so expensive?"

If the answer is "still very expensive", then the fig leaf of "lack of economies of scale" is immediately torn off. The problem is not the output at all, but the underlying design itself is wrong.

Another example: when founding The Boring Company to solve urban ground traffic congestion, ordinary people think of building roads and imposing traffic restrictions on a two-dimensional plane; while Musk uses extreme deduction to think: high-rise buildings are three-dimensional, but roads are two-dimensional, people from dozens of floors of buildings all flock to the same ground level, which will inevitably cause congestion physically.

The diameter of the earth is more than 12,000 kilometers, and there is no physical upper limit for digging 30 layers of tunnels downward. So the problem is instantly transformed from "how to manage traffic" into a pure engineering limit problem: how to increase the speed of tunnel boring machines by 10 times and reduce the cost by 90%?

4. "Factory as Product" and Speed Moat

Many entrepreneurs regard "business model", "license" or "patent" as a moat. But in the third part of *The Book of Elon* "Building a Company", Musk subverts this perception.

First, the factory itself is a product.

Making a prototype car or a prototype rocket is "as simple as playing house" in Musk's view. The real hell is stable mass production with large scale, high yield and low cost. The "machine that manufactures the machine (that is, the factory)" is 10 to 100 times more difficult than designing the product itself.

Entrepreneurs should not only be "product managers", they must polish the entire company, the entire delivery system and production line as core products, and even move the design engineers' workstations directly next to the production line to be responsible for their own drawings.

Second, speed is the best offense and the best defense.

Musk has publicly open-sourced a large number of Tesla's patents, because he believes that patents are crutches for the weak to defend. If your innovation speed is fast enough, when competitors finally figure out your drawings from three years ago, you have already evolved to the next generation of products.

When xAI built Colossus, the world's largest AI training supercomputing cluster, the conventional industry cycle required 18 to 24 months. Musk used the first principle to dismantle the power supply, liquid cooling and network dependencies, adopted full parallel advancement instead of "serial waiting", and completed the launch in only 122 days.

Musk's iron law is: "If a timetable looks very long, it must be wrong."

III. How to survive in the days of "chewing glass and staring into the abyss"?

The way of thinking mentioned above is of course important, but what really makes Musk a legend is his powerful mental strength that allows him to keep moving forward in countless desperate situations of on the verge of bankruptcy, public ridicule, and betrayal by relatives and friends.

A friend of Musk once said that starting a business is like "chewing glass while staring into the abyss of death".

Musk fully agrees with this, and adds: "The first few months of starting a business are always exciting, but soon the happiness fades away, and all that is left is pain. The so-called 'staring into the abyss' means that you wake up every day facing the imminent disaster of the company going bankrupt at any time; the so-called 'chewing glass' means that you have to deal with the most difficult, disgusting and evasive mess in the whole company every day. Because the easy things have already been done by your subordinates, and the problems that can be placed on the CEO's desk are all life-threatening problems."

In the darkest winter of 2008, all three previous rocket launches of SpaceX exploded into ashes, Tesla Roadster was mired in cost runaway and delivery crisis, and at the same time the global financial crisis broke out.

Musk exhausted all his savings on Christmas Eve, had to borrow money from friends to pay the rent, and even screamed and tore the sheets in his sleep due to extreme anxiety. When he woke up during the day, he had to endure severe stomach pain and even vomiting, and continued to raise funds and modify rocket drawings.

How on earth is this extraordinary "mental strength" forged? *The Book of Elon* reveals the four pillars of Musk's mental strength system:

1. Use a grand goal beyond the self to dilute the immediate pain

Why do ordinary entrepreneurs easily collapse, get anxious, and want to give up when encountering a little setback? Because their goals are often anchored in self-interest — how much money to make, what car to buy, how long to go public.

When the goal is only for the enjoyment of the "small self", once you encounter great pain, the brain will instinctively calculate the input-output ratio: "It's so painful, I might as well go to work or lie flat."

In the first chapter of *The Book of Elon*, the core life philosophy given by Musk is only a few words: "Be a useful person". He puts forward a "usefulness formula" to measure the value of life and business:

The total value of life = the number of people you help × the average degree of help each person gets.

Since his college days, Musk has been thinking: What things can rewrite the trajectory of human destiny to the greatest extent? He selected three directions: the Internet, sustainable energy, multi-planetary species (space exploration), and later added artificial intelligence and brain-computer interface.

He has repeatedly said bluntly: "Money