3 Month Deadline

This will keep us safe and happy.

Elon Musk:

• "Well, I mean, Tesla really faced this fear of-- threat of death, due to the Model 3 production ramp."
• "Essentially, the company was bleeding money like crazy, and just, if we didn't solve these problems in a very short period of time, uh, we would die."
• "And it was extremely difficult to solve them."
• "We were within... single digit weeks."
• "Absolutely, yes, like seven days a week. Sleeping in the factory."
• "I worked everywhere-- I worked-- I was in the paint shop, general assembly, body shop."

“Welcome to production hell!” 

When the Model 3 began rolling o the production line in July 2017— miraculously meeting the insane deadline Musk had set—Tesla held a raucous event at the Fremont factory to celebrate. Before going onstage, he was scheduled to go into a small room and take questions from a handful of journalists. But something was wrong. He had been in a morbid mood all day, belting down a couple of Red Bulls to keep himself going, then trying to meditate, something he never had seriously done before. 

Franz von Holzhausen and JB Straubel tried to break him out of his stupor with a pep talk. But Musk seemed unresponsive, blank-faced, depressed. “I’ve been in severe emotional pain for the last few weeks,” he later said. “Severe. It took every ounce of will to be able to do the Model 3 event and not look like the most depressed guy around.” Finally, he steeled himself to go into the press conference. He appeared irritated, then distracted. “Sorry for being a little dry,” he told the reporters. “Got a lot on my mind right now.” 

Then it was time to appear in front of two hundred screaming fans and employees. He tried to put on a good show, at least at rst. He drove a new red Model 3 onstage, jumped out, and raised his arms to the sky. “The whole point of this company was to make a really great, aordable electric car,” he said, “and we nally have.”  But his talk soon took on an eerie tone. Even those in the audience could tell that, despite his attempt to look joyful, he was in a very dark place. Instead of celebrating, he warned about tough times ahead. “The major challenge for us over the next six to nine months is how do we build a huge number of cars,” he said haltingly. “Frankly we’re going to be in production hell.” Then he started giggling maniacally. “Welcome! Welcome! Welcome to production hell! That’s where we are going to be for at least six months.” 

That prospect, like all hellish dramas, seemed to ll him with dark energy. “I look forward to working alongside you journeying through hell,” he told his startled audience. “As the saying goes, if you’re going through hell, just keep going.” 

He was. And he did. 

Giga Nevada hell 

In times of emotional darkness, Musk throws himself into his work, maniacally. And he did so after the July 2017 event marking the beginning of Model 3 production. 

He had one primary focus: ramping up production so that Tesla was churning out ve thousand Model 3s per week. He had done the calculations of the company’s costs, overhead, and cash ow. If it hit that rate, Tesla would survive. If not, it would run out of money. He repeated that like a mantra to every executive, and he installed monitors at the factory showing the up-to-the- minute output of cars and components. 

Reaching ve thousand cars per week would be a huge challenge. By the end of 2017, Tesla was making cars at only half that rate. Musk decided he had to move himself, literally, to the factory oors and lead an all-in surge. It was a tactic—personally surging into the breach 24/7 with an all-hands-on-deck cadre of fellow fanatics—that came to dene the maniacal intensity that he demanded at his companies. 

He began with the Gigafactory in Nevada, where Tesla made batteries. The person who designed the line there told Musk that making ve thousand battery packs a week was insane. At most they could make eighteen hundred. “If you’re right, Tesla is dead,” Musk told him. “We either have ve thousand cars a week or we can’t cover our costs.” Building more lines would take another year, the executive said. Musk moved him out and brought in a new captain, Brian Dow, who had the gung-ho mentality Musk liked. 

Musk took charge of the factory oor, playing the role of a feverish eld marshal. “It was a frenzy of insanity,” he says. “We were getting four or ve hours’ sleep, often on the oor. I remember thinking, ‘I’m like on the ragged edge of sanity.’ ” His colleagues agreed. 

Musk called in reinforcements, including his most loyal lieutenants: Mark Juncosa, his engineering sidekick at SpaceX, and Steve Davis, who headed The Boring Company. He even enlisted his young cousin James Musk, son of Errol’s younger brother, who had just graduated from Berkeley and joined the Tesla Autopilot team as a coder. “I got a call from Elon saying be at the Van Nuys airstrip in an hour,” he says. “We ew to Reno and I ended up staying there four months.” 

“There were a billion problems,” Juncosa says. “A third of the cells were fucked up, and a third of the workstations were fucked up.” They fanned out to work on dierent sections of the battery line, going station to station and troubleshooting any process that was slowing things down. “When we got too exhausted, we’d go crash at the motel for four hours, then head back,” Juncosa says. 

Omead Afshar, a biomedical engineer who had minored in poetry, had just been hired to join Sam Teller as an aide-de-camp to Musk. Growing up in Los Angeles, he carried a briefcase to grade school because he wanted to be like his father, an Iranian-born engineer. He worked for a few years setting up facilities for a medical equipment manufacturer, and he quickly bonded with Musk after joining Tesla. They both spoke with a soft stutter that cloaked an engineering mindset. On his rst day on the job, after renting an apartment near Tesla’s Silicon Valley headquarters, he was swept up in the surge and spent the next three months working at the Nevada battery Gigafactory and crashing at a $20-a- night motel nearby. Seven days a week, he would get up at 5 a.m., have a cup of coee with the manufacturing guru Tim Watkins, work at the factory until 10 p.m., and then have a glass of wine with Watkins before crashing. 

At one point Musk noticed that the assembly line was being slowed at a station where strips of berglass were glued to the battery packs by an expensive 

but slow robot. The robot’s suction cups kept dropping the strip and it applied too much glue. “I realized that the rst error was trying to automate the process, which was my fault because I pushed for a lot of automation,” he says. 

After much frustration, Musk nally asked a basic question: “What the hell are these strips for?” He was trying to visualize why berglass pieces were needed between the battery and the oor pan. The engineering team told him that it had been specied by the noise reduction team to cut down on vibration. So he called the noise reduction team, which told him that the specication came from the engineering team to reduce the risk of re. “It was like being in a Dilbert cartoon,” Musk says. So he ordered them to record the sound inside a car without the berglass and then with the berglass. “See if you can tell the dierence,” he told them. They couldn’t. 

“Step one should be to question the requirements,” he says. “Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.” 

The same approach worked even on the smallest details. For example, when the battery packs were completed in Nevada, little plastic caps were put on the prongs that would plug it into the car. When the battery got to the Fremont car- assembly factory, the plastic caps were removed and discarded. Sometimes, they would run out of caps in Nevada and have to hold up shipment of the batteries. When Musk asked why the caps existed, he was told they had been specied to make sure the pins did not get bent. “Who specied that requirement?” he asked. The factory team scrambled to nd out, but they weren’t able to come up with a name. “So delete them,” Musk said. They did, and it turned out they never had a problem with bent pins. 

Although there was an esprit de corps among Musk’s posse, he could be cold and rough on others. At 10 p.m. one Saturday, he became angry about a robotic arm that installed a cooling tube into a battery. 

“When Elon gets upset, he lashes out, often at junior people,” says Jon McNeill. “Gage’s story was fairly typical of his behavior where he just couldn’t really process his frustration in a productive way.” JB Straubel, Musk’s kinder and gentler cofounder, cringed at Musk’s behavior. “In retrospect it may seem like great war stories,” he says, “but in the middle of it, it was absolutely horric. He was making us re people who had been personal friends for a very long time, which was super painful.” 

Musk says in response that people such as Straubel and McNeill were too reluctant to re people. In that area of the factory, things had not been working well. Parts were piling up by the workstations, and the line wasn’t moving. “By trying to be nice to the people,” Musk says, “you’re actually not being nice to the dozens of other people who are doing their jobs well and will get hurt if I don’t x the problem spots.” 

He spent that Thanksgiving Day at the factory, along with a few of his sons, because he had requested workers to come in. Any day that the factory was not making batteries would set back the number of cars that Tesla could produce. 

Chapter 2

Walk to the red 

In the middle of the Fremont factory is the main conference room, known as Jupiter. Musk used it as his oce, meeting space, haven from mental torments, and sometimes a place to sleep. An array of screens, blinking and updating like stock displays, tracked in real time the total output of the factory and of each workstation. 

Musk had come to realize that designing a good factory was like designing a microchip. It was important to create, in each patch, the right density, ow, and processes. So he paid the most attention to a monitor that showed each station on the assembly line with a green or red light indicating whether it was owing properly. There were also green and red lights at the stations themselves, so Musk was able to walk the oor and home in on trouble spots. His team called it “walk to the red.” 

The surge at Fremont began the rst week of April 2018. That Monday, he began walking the oor with his fast bearlike gait, heading to any red light he saw. 

What’s the problem? A part was missing. Who’s in charge of that part? Get him over here. A sensor keeps tripping. Who calibrated it? Find someone who can open the console. Can we adjust the settings? Why do we even need that fucking sensor? 

The process was paused that afternoon because SpaceX was launching a critical cargo supply mission to the Space Station. So Musk went back to the Jupiter conference room to watch it on one of the monitors. But even then, his eyes kept darting to the screens showing the production numbers and bottlenecks on the Tesla line. Sam Teller ordered Thai takeout, then Musk resumed his procession through the factory, looking for the red lights. At 2:30 a.m., he was with the night shift underneath a car being moved on a rack watching bolts being installed. Why do we have four bolts there? Who set that specification? Can we do it with two? Try it. 

Throughout the spring and early summer of 2018, he prowled the factory oor, like he had in Nevada, making decisions on the y. “Elon was going completely apeshit, marching from station to station,” says Juncosa. Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the oor. “At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later,” he said. “But if I don’t make decisions, we die.” 

One day Lars Moravy, a valued top executive, was working at Tesla’s executive headquarters a few miles away in Palo Alto. He got an urgent call from Omead Afshar asking him to come to the factory. There he found Musk sitting cross- legged underneath the elevated conveyor moving car bodies down the line. Again he was struck by the number of bolts that had been specied. “Why are there six here?” he asked, pointing. 

“To make it stable in a crash,” Moravy replied. 

“No, the main crash load would come through this rail,” Musk explained. He had visualized where all the pressure points would be and started rattling o the tolerance numbers at each spot. Moravy sent it back to the engineers to be redesigned and tested. 

At another of the stations, the partially completed auto bodies were bolted to a skid that moved them through the nal assembly process. The robotic arms 

tightening the bolts were, Musk thought, moving too slowly. “Even I could do it faster,” he said. He told the workers to see what the settings were for the bolt drivers. But nobody knew how to open the control console. “Okay,” he said, “I’m just going to just stand here until we nd someone who can bring up that console.” Finally a technician was found who knew how to access the robot’s controls. Musk discovered that the robot was set to 20 percent of its maximum speed and that the default settings instructed the arm to turn the bolt backward twice before spinning it forward to tighten. “Factory settings are always idiotic,” he said. So he quickly rewrote the code to delete the backward turns. Then he set the speed to 100 percent capacity. That started to strip the threads, so he dialed it back to 70 percent. It worked ne and cut the time it took to bolt the cars to the skids by more than half. 

One part of the painting process, an electrocoat bath, involved dipping the shell of the car into a tank. Areas of the car shell have small holes so that the cavities will drain after the dipping. These holes are then plugged with patches made of synthetic rubber, known as butyl patches. “Why are we applying these?” Musk asked one of the line managers, who replied that it had been specied by the vehicle structures department. So Musk summoned the head of that department. “What the hell are these for?” he demanded. “They’re slowing the whole damn line.” He was told that in a ood, if the water is higher than the oorboards, the butyl patches help prevent the oor from getting too wet. “That’s insane,” Musk responded. “Once in ten years there will be such a ood. When it happens, the oor mats can get wet.” The patches were deleted. 

The production lines often halted when safety sensors were triggered. Musk decided they were too sensitive, tripping when there was no real problem. He tested some of them to see if something small like a piece of paper falling past the sensor could trigger a stoppage. This led to a crusade to weed out sensors in both Tesla cars and SpaceX rockets. “Unless a sensor is absolutely needed to start an engine or safely stop an engine before it explodes, it must be deleted,” he wrote in an email to SpaceX engineers. “Going forward, anyone who puts a sensor (or anything) on the engine that isn’t obviously critical will be asked to leave.” 

Some of the managers objected. They felt that Musk was compromising safety and quality in order to rush production. The senior director for production 

quality left. A group of current and former employees told CNBC that they were “pressured to take shortcuts to hit aggressive Model 3 production goals.” They also said they were pushed to make patchwork xes, such as repairing cracked plastic brackets with electrical tape. The New York Times reported that workers felt pressure to work ten-hour days. “It’s a constant ‘How many cars have we built so far?’—a constant pressure to build,” one worker told the paper. There was some truth to the complaints. Tesla’s injury rate was 30 percent higher than the rest of the industry. 

Robot removal 

During his push to ramp up production at the Nevada battery factory, Musk had learned that there are certain tasks, sometimes very simple ones, that humans do better than robots. We can use our eyes to look around a room and nd just the right tool we need. Then we can weave our way over, pick it up with our ngers and thumb, eyeball the right spot to use it, and guide it there with our arm. Easy, right? Not for a robot, however good its cameras. At Fremont, where each assembly line had twelve hundred robotic devices, Musk came to the same realization he had in Nevada about the perils of pursuing automation too relentlessly.

Near the end of the nal assembly line were robotic arms trying to adjust the little seals around the windows. They were having a hard time. One day, after standing silently in front of the balky robotics for a few minutes, Musk tried doing the task with his own hands. It was easy for a human. He issued an order, similar to the one he had given in Nevada. “You have seventy-two hours to remove every unnecessary machine,” he declared. 

The robot removal started grimly. People had a lot vested in the machines. But then it became like a game. Musk started walking down the conveyor line, wielding a can of orange spray paint. “Go or stay?” he would ask Nick Kalayjian, his vice president for engineering, or others. If the answer was “go,” the piece would be marked with an orange X, and workers would tear it o the line. “Soon he was laughing, like with childlike humor,” Kalayjian says. 

Musk took responsibility for the over-automation. He even announced it publicly. “Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” he tweeted. “To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.” 

After the de-automation and other improvements, the juiced-up Fremont plant was churning out thirty-ve hundred Model 3 sedans per week by late May 2018. That was impressive, but it was far short of the ve thousand per week that Musk had promised for the end of June. The short-sellers, with their spies and drones, determined that there was no way the factory, with its two assembly lines, could get to that number. They also knew that there was no way for Tesla to build another factory, or even get a permit to do so, for at least a year. “The shorts thought they had perfect information,” Musk says, “and they were all gloating online that, ‘Hah, Tesla is screwed.’ ” 

The tent 

Musk likes military history, especially the tales of warplane development. At a meeting at the Fremont factory on May 22, he recounted a story about World War II. When the government needed to rush the making of bombers, it set up production lines in the parking lots of the aerospace companies in California. He discussed the idea with Jerome Guillen, whom he would soon promote to being Tesla’s president of automotive, and they decided that they could do something similar. 

There was a provision in the Fremont zoning code for something called “a temporary vehicle repair facility.” It was intended to allow gas stations to set up tents where they could change tires or muers. But the regulations did not specify a maximum size. “Get one of those permits and start building a huge tent,” he told Guillen. “We’ll have to pay a ne later.” 

That afternoon, Tesla workers began clearing away the rubble that covered an old parking lot behind the factory. There was not time to pave over the cracked concrete, so they simply paved a long strip and began erecting a tent around it. One of Musk’s ace facilities builders, Rodney Westmoreland, ew in to coordinate the construction, and Teller rounded up some ice-cream trucks to hand out treats to those working in the hot sun. In two weeks, they were able to 

complete a tented facility that was 1,000 feet long and 150 feet wide, big enough to accommodate a makeshift assembly line. Instead of robots, there were humans at each station. 

One problem was that they did not have a conveyor belt to move the unnished cars through the tent. All they had was an old system for moving parts, but it was not powerful enough to move car bodies. “So we put it on a slight slope, and gravity meant it had enough power to move the cars at the right speed,” Musk says. 

At just after 4 p.m. on June 16, just three weeks after Musk came up with the idea, the new assembly line was rolling Model 3 sedans out of the makeshift tent. Neal Boudette of the New York Times had come to Fremont to report on Musk in action, and he was able to see the tent going up in the parking lot. “If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible,” Musk told him, “then unconventional thinking is necessary.” 

Birthday celebration 

Musk’s forty-seventh birthday, on June 28, 2018, came just before the deadline he had promised for reaching ve thousand cars per week. He spent most of the day in the paint shop of the main factory. Why is it backing up? he would ask each time there was a slowdown, and then he would walk over to the choke point and stand there until engineers came and xed the situation. 

Amber Heard called to wish him a happy birthday, after which he dropped his phone and it broke, so he was not in a good mood. But Teller was able to get him to take a break just after 2 p.m. for a quick celebration in the conference room. “Enjoy year 48 in the simulation!” read the icing on the ice-cream cake that Teller bought. There were no knives or forks, so they ate it with their hands. 

Twelve hours later, just after 2:30 a.m., Musk nally left the factory oor and returned to the conference room. But it would be another hour before he would fall asleep there. Instead, he watched on one of the monitors the launch of a SpaceX rocket at Cape Canaveral. It was carrying a robotic assistant along with supplies that included sixty packets of super-caeinated Death Wish Coee for 

the astronauts on the International Space Station. The launch went awlessly, making it the fteenth successful cargo mission SpaceX had own for NASA. 

June 30, the deadline Musk had promised for reaching the goal of ve thousand cars per week, was a Saturday, and when Musk woke up on the conference room couch that morning and looked at the monitors, he realized they would succeed. He worked for a few hours on the paint line, then rushed from the factory, still wearing protective sleeves, to his airplane to make it to Spain in time to be the best man at Kimbal’s wedding in a medieval Catalonian village. 

At 1:53 a.m. on Sunday, July 1, a black Model 3 was disgorged from the factory with a paper banner across its windshield reading “5000th.” When Musk received a photograph of it on his iPhone, he sent a message to all Tesla workers: “We did it!!... Created entirely new solutions that were thought impossible. Intense in tents. Whatever. It worked.... I think we just became a real car company.” 

The algorithm 

At any given production meeting, whether at Tesla or SpaceX, there is a nontrivial chance that Musk will intone, like a mantra, what he calls “the algorithm.” It was shaped by the lessons he learned during the production hell surges at the Nevada and Fremont factories. His executives sometimes move their lips and mouth the words, like they would chant the liturgy along with their priest. “I became a broken record on the algorithm,” Musk says. “But I think it’s helpful to say it to an annoying degree.” It had ve commandments: 

1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb. 

2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough. 

3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist. 

4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the rst three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. 

5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out. 

The algorithm was sometimes accompanied by a few corollaries, among them: 

All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time coding. Solar roof managers must spend time on the roofs doing installations. Otherwise, they are like a cavalry leader who can’t ride a horse or a general who can’t use a sword. 

Comradery is dangerous. It makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work. There is a tendency to not want to throw a colleague under the bus. That needs to be avoided. 

It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be condent and wrong. 

Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do. 

Whenever there are problems to solve, don’t just meet with your managers. Do a skip level, where you meet with the level right below your managers. 

When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant. 

A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. 

The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation. 

Elon Musk's approach to resolving the production challenges at Tesla, often referred to as "production hell," involved a series of hands-on, decisive actions. Here's a summary of key steps he took:

1. Direct Involvement and Monitoring: Musk personally involved himself in the factory's operations, setting up an office in the Fremont factory and closely monitoring production through real-time data.

2. Identifying and Addressing Bottlenecks: He adopted the "walk to the red" strategy, where he would directly go to parts of the production line indicated by red lights, signaling issues or slowdowns, and address them on the spot.

3. Rapid Decision-Making: Musk made quick, on-the-fly decisions to resolve issues, understanding that some decisions might be wrong but necessary to keep the momentum.

4. Streamlining Processes: He constantly looked for ways to streamline and simplify the manufacturing process, often questioning the necessity of certain parts or procedures.

5. Adjusting Automation: Musk realized the limitations of over-automation and shifted to a more balanced approach, combining automated processes with human labor where more efficient.

6. Improving Equipment Efficiency: He personally intervened to adjust settings on machinery, like increasing the speed of robotic arms, to enhance productivity.

7. Eliminating Unnecessary Components: Musk questioned the need for certain components and processes, removing those that were not essential to speed up production.

8. Focus on Practical Solutions: He emphasized practical, sometimes unconventional solutions, like setting up an additional assembly line in a tent to increase capacity.

9. Prioritizing Urgency and Flexibility: Musk maintained a sense of urgency and flexibility, encouraging his team to be quick and adaptive in solving problems.

10. Developing a Production Algorithm: Based on his experiences, Musk formulated a production algorithm with key principles like questioning requirements, deleting unnecessary parts, simplifying processes, accelerating cycle time, and automating last.

11. Personal Involvement: Musk immersed himself in the factory operations, moving his workspace to the factory floor to be at the heart of production.

12. Intensive Monitoring: He installed monitors to track real-time production data, allowing him to identify and address issues promptly.

13. Direct Problem-Solving: Musk personally addressed production bottlenecks, often questioning the necessity of certain parts or processes and making on-the-spot decisions to streamline operations.

14. Leadership by Example: He led from the front, working alongside his team on the factory floor, often for extended hours, to demonstrate his commitment and to motivate his team.

15. Rapid Adaptation and Innovation: Musk was open to rapid changes, including rethinking the automation strategy and simplifying processes where necessary.

16. Calling in Reinforcements: He brought in trusted lieutenants and experts from his other ventures (like SpaceX) to assist with specific challenges.

17. Questioning and Eliminating Redundancies: Musk consistently questioned the purpose of each component and process, eliminating anything that was not essential to streamline production.

18. Adjusting Automation Levels: He recalibrated the balance between automated and manual processes, removing excessive automation that hindered efficiency.

19. Maintaining a Sense of Urgency: Musk instilled a culture of urgency and high performance, emphasizing the critical nature of meeting production targets.

20. Accepting Responsibility: He publicly acknowledged mistakes, particularly regarding over-automation, and took steps to rectify them.

Prioritizing Production Goals: Musk made it clear that meeting the production target of 5,000 Model 3s per week was crucial for Tesla's survival, focusing all efforts on this goal.

These steps demonstrate Musk's hands-on leadership style and his willingness to challenge conventional manufacturing processes to achieve ambitious production goals.