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.
Comment
byu/ElonMuskOfficial from discussion
inIAmA
Comment
byu/ElonMuskOfficial from discussion
inIAmA
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 drops a surprise update on Boring Company’s next big dig
Musk says Boring Company could shrink the Austin to San Antonio drive to just minutes.
Elon Musk says The Boring Company is working on what he called “a simple, precursor Hyperloop” tunnel connecting Austin and San Antonio, targeting speeds above 200 mph and cutting a drive that can take up to two and a half hours down to a consistent under 30 minutes. Musk posted the idea on X Sunday, in a reply to a repost of an AI generated video imagining a science fiction future with human colonies on other worlds, which he shared with the line “This is the future we shall bring into being.”
This is the future we shall bring into being pic.twitter.com/8aD0w8MDVc
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 20, 2026
The Boring Company’s own account picked up the idea in the same thread, adding a detail about how the trip would actually work: “Because Loop/Hyperloop is express (i.e. no intermediate stops), one could travel from an Austin parking lot to a favorite San Antonio restaurant in about 30 minutes. As long as they both have Loop stations.” That framing ties the proposed intercity link to the same station model the company already runs in Las Vegas, where riders enter the tunnel network through small, garage style stops rather than one central terminal.
This is not the company’s first run at the Austin to San Antonio corridor. Boring Company floated tunnels between the two cities as far back as 2021, and later competed for a separate San Antonio Loop project tied to the airport before that specific bid stalled. Pitches for tunnels in Chicago, Los Angeles, and a New York to Washington corridor have followed a similar pattern of big announcement without a shovel in the ground.
What is different this time is the balance sheet, especially since The Boring Company closed a 3 billion dollar funding round led by investors in the United Arab Emirates earlier this month at a valuation near 23 billion dollars, giving the tunneling company more capital to chase speculative projects than it had during its earlier Texas pitches. The company is also mid-build on two other intercity systems it has actually broken ground on, inc;luding a Nashville tunnel linking downtown to the airport, where a second boring machine finished commissioning in June, and its Las Vegas network, where the station count keeps climbing on paper faster than tunnels get dug.
That gap between announcement and execution is the reason to treat Sunday’s post as an opening bid rather than a project. A tunnel spanning roughly 80 miles between two metro areas, running at speeds Boring Company has not demonstrated over any real distance, would dwarf anything the company has built. For now, the Austin to San Antonio Hyperloop exists as a caption under an AI generated space video.
Elon Musk
Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production
Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.
Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.
Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.
Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.
Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.
Elon Musk
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Tesla is now shipping Cybercabs from Giga Texas with Starlink hardware built in as standard.
Tesla’s Cybercabs are now leaving Gigafactory Texas with Starlink hardware on the rear hatch in significant numbers, according to drone footage captured Tuesday by longtime Austin drone observer Joe Tegtmeyer. Production at the factory ramped back up after the Labor Day weekend, and his flyover of the outbound lot showed rows of gold Cybercabs alongside Model Y Long Wheelbase units, many carrying the satellite module for the first time as standard equipment rather than a one off retrofit.
Giga Texas today is busy with production coming back up following the long weekend. Of interest today in the outbound lot is the appearance of hundreds of Mode; YL’s and many more Cybercabs and for the 1st time equipped with the Starlink module one the hatch in big numbers.
At… pic.twitter.com/G9yl6s51m4
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 8, 2026
Tesla first showed Starlink built into an actual Cybercab on August 10, when the Robotaxi account posted images of a single gold unit with the antenna integrated into the roofline above the taillights and called it the first Cybercab with Starlink integration. That followed a July reveal where Tesla and Starlink jointly posted a cutaway diagram of the antenna placement without a working vehicle to back it up. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI software, said at the time that the connection isn’t required for the car to drive itself. It exists mainly for navigation, customer service and keeping tabs on the fleet.
Musk has made a different case in public. During Tesla’s Q2 earnings call, he said the company can’t afford robotaxis stranded in what he called “Bermuda Triangles of lack of cellular connectivity,” and he separately claimed on X that Starlink will eventually reach every Tesla built, calling it the only way to deliver high bandwidth to billions of vehicles. He has also pitched the antenna as an entertainment upgrade, telling riders they would be able to stream 4K video or play games during a trip.
The rollout has moved fast since. Robotaxi service opened to the public in Austin on September 3, and Cybercabs had already been spotted with Starlink hardware in Houston and near Miami International Airport in the weeks before Tuesday’s factory footage showed the module shipping at volume rather than on scattered test units. Whether the satellite link earns its keep is still an open question. Tesla’s unsupervised service currently runs in dense metro geofences in Texas and Florida, markets where cellular coverage is already strong, which is not where the rural dead zones Musk describes tend to show up.
Tesla Semi lands the biggest electric truck deal in U.S. history
Tesla integrates Grok Bot into its vehicles for the ultimate personal assistant
