Lifestyle
Top 5 tips on how to work like Elon Musk and be that ‘model employee’
Tesla has recently come under scrutiny after the company fired 400 to 700 employees over poor performance reviews. The company issued the following statement in regards to the firing:
Like all companies, Tesla conducts an annual performance review during which a manager and employee discuss the results that were achieved, as well as how those results were achieved, during the performance period. This includes both constructive feedback and recognition of top performers with additional compensation and equity awards, as well as promotions in many cases. As with any company, especially one of over 33,000 employees, performance reviews also occasionally result in employee departures. Tesla is continuing to grow and hire new employees around the world.
But amid accusations from former employees who allege that the recent firing was a layoff in disguise, one might question the true motive behind Tesla’s recent departures. A look at the company’s Glassdoor profile reveals that 88% of employees approve of CEO Elon Musk, suggesting that the serial entrepreneur’s vision for the future and execution strategy has largely gained acceptance among his legion of workers. Still, cries of tough work-life balance, long hours, and a CEO that’s widely known to be difficult to please, scatter into the mix of 1200-plus company reviews.
One can argue that being able to meet Musk’s standards for employee quality might come down to one’s work ethics and their ability to be a vector that has significant weight in the ‘sum of all vectors’.
“Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.” – Elon Musk
Here are 5 tips on how Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, among other side projects, is able to maintain productivity each day and achieve his level of success.
1. Work twice as hard as others, but also sleep
The first ‘tip’ doesn’t come as much of a surprise. It’s the unrelenting determination that allows one to work as much as Elon Musk does.
“Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing you know that… you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.” -Elon Musk
Having worked the 100-hour long work weeks in the past that were augmented by cans of Diet Coke and several large cups of coffee each day, Musk also realized that getting enough sleep is also a must. The serial tech entrepreneur has revealed in the past that he sleeps at 1 a.m. and up at 7 a.m each day.
When asked about his quantity of sleep each night, Musk responded on a reddit AMA that he sleeps an average of 6 hours.
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2. Learn new skills
Musk is constantly looking at new ways to self-improve and keep ideas fresh while soliciting truthful feedback from people he’s close with.
“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself,”
3. Schedule everything, and don’t meet just to meet
Elon Musk is notorious for his famously efficient meetings. Beyond scheduling activities into 5-minute time slots, Musk believes that people must provide value in the time that they’re allotted for a particular task.
A former SpaceX employee relayed a story where Elon Musk once questioned an employee’s attendance in a meeting.
“One of my close friends started there a couple years before me. He worked (and still does) in an analysis group, so meetings made less sense when you could just walk over and ask someone a question. He told me a story one time (this is paraphrased):
Elon to a meeting member: “You haven’t said anything. Why are you in here?”
That may be borderline rude, but it makes sense. Don’t be in a meeting unless there’s a purpose for it; either to make a decision, or get people up to speed. In most cases, an email will suffice.”
With engineers and management being paid between $80-100 per hour, having a group of them inside a meeting means that the company is burning a relatively expensive clock.
4. Be open to negative criticism
More often than not, people instinctively signal their defense mechanism when faced with negative feedback. But Musk believes that self improvement comes with being open to constructive criticism.
“I think it’s important for people to pay close attention to negative feedback and rather than ignore negative feedback, you have to listen to it carefully.
Ignore it if the underlying reason for the negative feedback doesn’t make sense but otherwise, people should adjust their behavior.
I’m not perfect at it, for sure, but I do think it’s really important to solicit negative feedback, particularly from people who have your best interest in mind.”
Listen to Musk describe his approach to self improvement in his interview with TED curator Chris Anderson.
5. Manage your emotions
Being able to overcome adversity requires intense focus, positivity, and the ability to overcome fear by controlling one’s emotions.
“I feel fear quite strongly. But if what I am doing is important enough, then I just override the fear,” Musk said in one of his past interviews.
When faced with seemingly impossible challenges and looming deadlines, Musk believes that optimism and being able to manage one’s emotions will lead to exceptional success and personal growth in one shape or form.
Challenge yourself to think big, take risks, and control your emotions while doing so.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years
Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.
Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.
In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.
The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.
But we do need to act much faster than that if people still want to live where the beach is today. We have about 50 years or so to take action, which should be more than enough time for the space satellites to solve any heating problems. https://t.co/xhrVQALwQw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.
This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.
A former Vancouver police sergeant with ALS accounts his journey to become a patient for Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain-computer interface technology.
“I’m texting you from my brain right now.” That was the first message Lee Marten sent after waking up from Neuralink surgery, five hours and one migraine after dozens of threads were stitched into his motor cortex.
Marten, a former Vancouver police sergeant, is one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain implant, and the 26th recipient overall. He tells his story in a first-person account published by Maclean’s.
Marten recounts how he was a healthy, athletic Vancouver police sergeant until April 2022 when symptoms of muscle twitching and balance loss, were followed by a bad fall that broke his leg. He would eventually be diagnosed with ALS in early 2025 at the age of 47. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that progressively destroys the motor neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, eventually taking away a patient’s ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. There’s no cure, and most patients live two to five years after diagnosis.
He describes the devastation of the diagnosis and how he began preparing for it while connecting with other young ALS patients through a WhatsApp group called Young Guns. Through that group he learned about a Neuralink clinical trial at Toronto Western Hospital and, after a roughly seven-month vetting process (physical assessments, psychiatric evaluation, a final interview with the Neuralink team), was accepted this past April as the trial’s 26th recipient and the first Canadian ALS patient to get the N1 implant. He recounts the May surgery in detail, including the robotic system that stitched 64 threads into his brain, and describes the app, Link, translating his neural signals into cursor control, which he was using within hours of waking up.
Marten walks through what daily use looks like, including weekly “brain training” exercises, a real-time neural-activity display, charging the implant via a beanie-mounted MagSafe charger, and using the implant for emailing, texting, social media, and gaming via a “Magic Box” that connects it to other devices. He also gives brief context on brain-computer interface history and quite candid about Musk, calling him “divisive” but saying he found him “easy to admire.
The piece closes on a heavier note, with Marten seeking to pursue medical assistance in dying as his symptoms progressed, noting that he’ll be able to communicate his final words to his family through Neuralink rather than facing a silent decline. He expresses hope the data from his case will help future ALS patients, even without a cure in his own lifetime.
Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Tesla Robotaxi riders will face the best dilemma when booking a ride
Tesla Cybercab sightings broaden well outside of Austin with autonomy in focus
