Marc Andreessen: Elon inspires incredible loyalty from his employees because they know he'll sit all night with them to solve a problem.

“Elon actually delegates almost everything. He's not involved in most of the things that his companies are doing. 

He's involved in the thing that is the biggest problem right now until that thing is fixed. 

And then, he doesn't have to be involved in it anymore, he can go focus on the next thing that's the biggest problem for that company right now. 

In manufacturing, there's this concept of the bottleneck. In any manufacturing chain, there's always some bottleneck, something that is keeping the manufacturing line from running the way that it's supposed to. Whatever the bottleneck, it's holding everything up. 

The job number one is to remove that bottleneck and get everything flowing again. I think Elon basically has universalized that concept and he basically looks at every company like it's some sort of conceptual assembly line. 

I don't need to manage everything else because everything else, by definition, is running better than that. I can go focus on that. 

A lot of CEOs, especially non-technical CEOs, would really struggle to implement his method. When he identifies the bottleneck, he goes and he talks to the line engineers who understand the technical nature of the bottleneck. 

If it's people on a manufacturing line, he's talking to people directly on the line. Or if that's people in a software development group, he's talking to the people actually writing the code. 

He's not asking the VP of Engineering to ask the Director of Engineering to ask the manager to ask the individual contributor to write a report that's to be reviewed in three weeks. He doesn't do that. He would throw them all out of the window. There's just no way he would do that. 

He goes and personally finds the engineer who actually has the knowledge about the thing, and then he sits in the room with that engineer and fixes the problem with them. 

This is why he inspires such incredible loyalty, especially from the technical people who he works with. They're like, wow, if I'm up against a problem I don't know how to solve, freaking Elon Musk is going to show up in his Gulfstream jet, and he's going to sit with me overnight in front of the keyboard or in front of the manufacturing line, and he's going to help me figure this out.”

Interview of @pmarca by @ChrisWillx on Youtube, December 14, 2024