How Elon Musk Solves Problems: 4 Key Frameworks

Whatever you think of him, there's no denying that Elon Musk is a fascinating person. As of today, he is the richest person in the world, with his net worth estimated at $222 billion, and he co-founded companies such as electric car maker Tesla, rocket producer SpaceX and tunnel startup Boring Company. His success rate is incredibly high.

Unlike Jeff Bezos' Musk, the second richest person in the world who won big but failed in 57 different projects (and happily admits his "cascade of experiments, errors and failures" ), Musk's approach appears to be gunshot rather than scattergun. Musk and Bezos are the two richest people in the world, so there must be merit in both methods. But how does Musk continue to build companies that never fail in a big way?

While you could attribute these consistent successes to his IQ, which is said to be 155, there are plenty of people with such a high IQ who aren't billionaires. What makes Musk different is that he thinks differently, being limited only by the laws of physics, after which, he said, "everything else is a recommendation".

On top of that, Musk uses specific mental models to solve real-world problems. Rather than being an anecdotal business theory, they have proven effective in practice across his various businesses. Four of these models are first principles thinking, imagining things at the limit, the platonic ideal and its optimization framework. Here they are in more detail.

1. Apply first principles thinking

A first principle is a fundamental truth that is "known by nature". First principles thinking is about removing subjective assumptions, biases, and guesswork from problems and focusing only on what is true. The goal is therefore to find the simplest truth that exists in the laws of physics, free from your personal limits and beliefs. Once this absolute truth is defined, you reason from there. Cut, strip, then build.

In practice, enter whatever answer you came up with, then remove any guesses. Musk thinks you'll either find a better answer or the same as everyone else. He admits, "I don't do any market research whatsoever" because it's not helpful and everyone else is wrong. "No matter who you are, everyone gets it wrong sometimes. All conceptions are wrong, it's just a matter of how wrong they are."

Musk applied the first principles of thinking to batteries, for example. You might hear people say, "batteries are expensive and they always will be". But batteries are made of cobalt, nickel, aluminum and polymers, relatively inexpensive materials. What is expensive is the making of these materials, the way they are combined into a battery. Thinking about first principles leads you to realize that batteries aren't expensive, they're made, which means the problem to be solved is manufacturing.

2. Think about things in the limit

Boundary thinking is a thought experiment in which any problem is scaled up and down to assess the changes that occur at both levels. A recent example involves Musk's acquisition of Twitter, after which he signaled that the 280 character limit would be changed, tweeting that "the ability to make long tweets [is] coming soon." Thinking about Twitter's character allocation in the limit means imagining what the platform would look like with the tweet length reduced to, say, 50 characters, and down to, say, 1000. The two limits would have different repercussions for the social network.< /p>

Whether it's a problem with your product, service, team, or bottom line, think big and play with the answers. For example, take a price problem where you're trying to figure out why something is expensive, then imagine your volume was one million units. Is the...