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 escalated his monthslong feud with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this week, pledging that his own AI video tool will produce a competing version before the year is out. Responding to a fan-made, AI-generated clip of the ancient epic, Musk wrote on X, “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
In June, Musk quoted an xAI-shared trailer built entirely with Grok Imagine Video 1.5, a two-minute-plus reimagining of The Odyssey styled after a 1970s classical Hollywood epic, and predicted “full movies by the end of the year,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That trailer, built from 36 consistent shots by a single creator, was Musk’s proof of concept. This week’s pledge turns that prediction into a specific commitment, tied directly to Homer’s text rather than a generic demo.
Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer https://t.co/bVHzUmY9WN
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2026
When a fan separately proposed that Musk fund a live-action alternative, to “give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek,” Musk replied with two words: “I’m down.”
The Grok Imagine pledge lands as the tool’s underlying infrastructure has changed hands. Grok is no longer a standalone product, it folded into SpaceXAI after SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI closed in February, meaning the compute behind any Odyssey production traces back to the same Colossus supercomputers now bundled into SpaceX’s pitch to investors. Musk has separately said SpaceX’s own engineering data is being fed into the next major Grok training run, a two trillion parameter model he’s called the “2T run.”
Whether Grok Imagine can sustain a feature length narrative, rather than a series of impressive individual shots, remains the open question.
Cybertruck
Tesla Mobile App gets a new feature that wrap fans are going to love
Tesla’s Summer Update removes the USB drive step from customizing your car’s digital wrap design.
Tesla’s latest 2026 Summer Update quietly closes out one of the more tedious steps in personalizing a Tesla’s digital appearance. Uploading a custom wrap design used to require a USB drive. Now it doesn’t.
The feature is listed in Tesla’s release notes as “Send Custom Wraps from Mobile App.” The company described it plainly: “Skip the USB drive and upload a custom wrap of your car from the mobile app. Instructions for creating a custom wrap here: github.com/teslamotors/custom-wraps.”
The digital wrap tool has been around since Tesla’s 2024 Holiday Update, when it launched for Cybertruck owners first, as Teslarati reported at the time. Getting a design onto the car meant formatting a USB drive, creating a folder named exactly “Wraps,” dropping in PNG files sized between 512×512 and 1024×1024 pixels and under 1 MB each, then plugging the drive in and applying the wrap through Toybox. Tesla expanded the tool to other models and renamed it from “Colorizer” to “Paint Shop” with the 2025 Holiday Update, while also adding license plate and window tint customization alongside the wraps.
Custom wraps via mobile app https://t.co/5OydZ26g9p pic.twitter.com/uexU0ZePxu
— Tesla (@Tesla) July 22, 2026
The latest Summer Update removes the USB step from that process. Owners will be able to pull a design from wherever they saved it, whether that’s a download from social media or something built from Tesla’s own GitHub templates, and push it to the car directly through the app.
Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more
It’s a small fix relative to the rest of this latest release, which also included expanded Grok voice commands, automatic navigation that learns regular routes, and self-driving stats inside the mobile app, all detailed in our rundown of the full Summer Update. The USB requirement was one of the more common complaints about Paint Shop since it launched. Tesla did not say when the wrap upload change would reach individual vehicles, only that the broader update is rolling out now in waves.
Elon Musk
Tesla Diner is throwing a birthday party with a Franz-signed special treat
Tesla Diner turns one on July 21 with Optimus, roller skates, and a Franz-signed hat.
Tesla is throwing its Hollywood Diner a first birthday party on July 21 and the celebration comes with a guest list of unique items, including a limited run of Tesla Diner birthday hats personally signed by Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen for the first 50 customers who place an in-car order at midnight.
One year after lines wrapped around the block on Santa Monica Boulevard for a diner that most of the restaurant industry did not take seriously, Tesla is making the case that the concept was worth the years it took to build. The concept had been in Musk’s head since at least 2018, when he floated the idea of “an old school drive-in, roller skates and rock restaurant” on X, describing it years later as “‘Grease’ meets ‘The Jetsons’ with Supercharging.”
Tesla Optimus Gen 3 is coming to the Tesla Diner with new ambitions
What made the diner genuinely different from any restaurant that came before it was not the menu or the nostalgia. It was the ordering model. Tesla owners could place food orders directly from their vehicle’s touchscreen before arriving, a small feature that hints at something much larger on the horizon. As the Cybercab and unsupervised FSD expand across major cities, the diner model becomes a template for an entirely new kind of commerce. A robotaxi pulling in to charge does not need a human to walk up to a counter. The vehicle places the order, the food is ready on arrival, and the passenger never interrupts the experience of being driven somewhere else. It is the first glimpse of what drive-through commerce looks like when the car is doing the driving.
As Teslarati has reported, Musk signaled immediately after opening that the Hollywood location was only the beginning, posting that Tesla would expand the concept to major cities worldwide and along Supercharger corridors on long-distance routes if the first location proved successful. One year in, the birthday celebration on July 21 makes a strong case that it has. Tesla announced a full day of events including a Cybercab on display, a birthday menu, Optimus in attendance, face painting, a photo booth, roller skating servers, a light show, a Skypad DJ, and complimentary collectibles.
If Musk’s ambition holds, the Hollywood diner is year one of something much bigger. The birthday party is the proof of concept. The robotaxi fleet is the business model waiting behind it.
Tesla Diner is turning 1 on July 21st, so we’re throwing a party
Come swing by for a day full of fun:
– Cybercab on display
– Birthday menu
– @Tesla_Optimus
– Face painting for kids & adults
– Photo booth
– Servers on roller skates delivering your order
– Light show
– Skypad DJ… pic.twitter.com/TD8pOjihYs— Tesla North America (@tesla_na) July 18, 2026
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
Tesla’s Supercharger Diner probably just secured more locations
