Elon Musk Algorithm – First Principles – Everything has to be the Best

Elon Musk does not accept good enough. Not industry-leading. Not world-class. The best. That is the standard, in everything, all the time. Rockets, electric vehicles, tunnel boring, brain-computer interfaces - the bar is always the absolute limit of what is possible.

Most organizations optimize for what is achievable. Musk asks what is theoretically possible and works backward from there. That is first-principles thinking applied at scale. Strip away convention, strip away assumption, strip away what has always been done - and find the actual floor.

The result is companies that do things that weren't supposed to be possible. Because the standard was never "possible." It was always "the best."

The Algorithm

Musk has a 5-step engineering algorithm he applies to every problem at SpaceX, Tesla, and everything else. He calls it the most important thing he has ever come up with. Most engineers skip straight to step 3. That is the mistake.

1. Make the requirement less dumb. Every requirement came from a person. Question it. Even smart people's requirements are wrong sometimes. The person who made the requirement should be named - anonymous requirements are not allowed.
2. Delete the part or process. If you are not occasionally adding things back, you are not deleting enough. The bias must be to remove. It is very common to make the requirement that something must exist. Delete it. If you don't occasionally add things back, you're not deleting enough.
3. Simplify or optimize. This is step 3, not step 1. Optimizing something that should be deleted is waste. Most engineers focus here first. Wrong order.
4. Accelerate cycle time. Go faster - but only after steps 1-3 are complete. Speed on the wrong thing is still wrong.
5. Automate. Last. Automating a broken process just makes it fail faster and at scale.

First Principles Thinking

Most people reason by analogy. "We do this because it's like what's always been done." "It costs this much because that's what it costs." Musk rejects this entirely.

First-principles thinking means boiling something down to the most fundamental truths and reasoning up from there. The battery example: the industry said battery packs would always cost around $600 per kilowatt-hour. Musk stripped it to the raw materials - cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, polymer, steel - at commodity prices. The actual floor was around $80 per kilowatt-hour. The gap between $600 and $80 was not physics. It was convention. That gap funded the Gigafactory.

The question is never "what does it cost?" It is "what does physics say it can cost?" The question is never "can we do this?" It is "is there a law of physics preventing this?" Everything else is a solvable problem.