I could tell Elon Musk was expanding his intellect as much as a few years ago, and I covered it as I witnessed it. It was in the kind of books that he was reading, and because of that, I’m not surprised by his support of President Trump. The only way you can remain a Democrat with Marxist foundations is through ignorance. When you start learning things, you can’t support dumb politics. While Elon Musk has always been intelligent and very successful, his political positions are more a result of knowledge than of upbringing or regional considerations. For him, the realities of running his businesses have driven him to learn more to survive and, ultimately, provide him with a political point of view that facilitates productivity. Having compassion for other people is one thing. Destroying the world over compassion is quite another, and I could tell that as Elon Musk dealt with the realities of politics through his businesses, especially the Department of Labor trying to push him to unionize his Tesla plants, he was heading toward more small government than an imposing, all-powerful government that could take everything you own, and sit on FAA permits because you weren’t supporting their political party to stay in power. For that matter, President Trump also went through the same kind of conversion throughout his life. That doesn’t make all these people suddenly conservative the way I would be. I grew up in a conservative area around a lot of conservative people, so I started that way. As I learned more in life, my roots in conservative thought deepened. But logic dictates that we all get to the same place once we figure out how the world works and the people in it strive to live in it.
So, with all that said, people wonder why Elon Musk is so successful and why those who work for him are so engaged. Now, I talk to many people at a consulting level. If people listen to me, they are successful. If they don’t, then they fail. There isn’t any muddy middle. There is no consensus on where everyone gets a participation trophy; success is a very rigid standard, and I always get asked about it by compelling people worldwide. My joint statement toward any successful enterprise is that engagement is the most important and challenging thing to manage in a business. You can see it in sports when two NFL teams play football. Usually when one team wins over another given that all the players are the same essentially, they all weigh the same, they are all just as tall and have talented players at all the positions. The element that determines winners from losers is the coaching staff and their ability to get good engagement from their players. Labor unions tend to be unproductive because people aren’t motivated to engage in the business through collective bargaining. They are always fighting the company management they work for to do as little as possible and still get paid wages at a highly engaged value. Getting people engaged in a project or company is elusive, and the easiest thing that most management turns to is wages, hoping that people will be motivated to make more money and that they might work harder as a result of how much they are paid. But of course, as I always say, money is not a good motivator. Throwing money at people does not get people to be more engaged; most of the time, it lowers it as more money often destroys the things that make a person good and strive to be better. Once a person stops striving for goals in their life, they tend to be less engaged in the things they do, from raising children to buying a new car.
I thought it was interesting that Elon Musk during the middle of October 2024 had launched new Tesla products, the Tesla Bot and the Tesla Taxi, then a few days later launched with SpaceX, the first Super Heavy Booster into space carrying a Starship, then landed it back at Boca Chica right on target to be captured by the giant chopsticks, to be reloaded with fuel and to launch again. It was a remarkable feat of engineering by thousands of people, and Elon Musk had created the culture that performed it. But Musk wasn’t done. The next day, SpaceX used a Falcon Heavy to launch the Europa Clipper, which is going to Jupiter to study a moon there, and it came off without a hitch. That launch alone a few years ago would have resulted from a decade of work at NASA. But after all that, do you know what Elon Musk was most proud of? He leveled up in the Diablo video game, which he does quite a lot playing video games. With all his success, he lives in a little shack at Boca Chica, runs around in t-shirts, and plays video games with his co-workers. He’s one of the wealthiest people in the world, if not the richest, and he has no pretense of measuring success the way we traditionally do, with great wealth hanging from him in a social context. And he cares about his high score in a popular video game.
What is expected at Elon Musk companies, and I know this personally, is that he recruits and retains highly engaged people. Business schools have yet to unlock this mystery because everyone learns the same wrong things. Elon Musk does a lot that goes well beyond Lean Manufacturing techniques, and no consulting firms in the world have yet figured it out. But I’ll tell everyone here for free because I like you. The secret to Elon Musk’s success is that he does not, as a management culture, rob his employees of their emotional investment in their work. By providing a job, they have a means to make a living. But he does not impose himself on their work and instead removes barriers to success. Not success measured in monetary value. Once people can pay for their lives, families, homes, and social engagements, they want to do work they feel good about. Elon Musk gives them jobs in which they can invest to create high-engagement cultures. Cultures where people want to work and express themselves through good work. If you watch employees at SpaceX, you see them highly engaged at all hours of the day, 7 days a week. Because they like their work, and it shows in what they do. Most companies miss these traits altogether because engagement is challenging to measure. But once it is unlocked, the results are apparent. Elon Musk showed how he gets high engagement by not being pretentious at so much success, especially after a week where he started it on stage with President Trump at that now famous rally at Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk was equally impressed with his high score on Diablo; people see that in him and can relate to him. When an owner or job provider does not rob people of the value of their work through social conditions that impose a static order upon them, people will then invest in themselves into a project because they want to, for all the same reasons that people play video games with no monetary compensation provided, at all. People do things because they feel good doing them. The world is far better off for a business or capitalist enterprise when people are engaged in their jobs because the products produced reflect that engagement. And when people are allowed to invest in themselves and not be robbed by some cultural stigma, success always follows. And winning becomes expected, not just some fantasy folklore from some island that time forgot. But it is available to all who dare to tap into its vast secrets and opportunities for the curious and hardworking.
Rich Hoffman
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The Overmanwarrior 