The Book of Elon
I'm reading The Book of Elon right now. I'm only at 26 percent. And yet I already feel comfortable saying this: it's the perfect companion to Naval's Almanack.
For builders and operators, it's required reading. If you're competing with someone who has read these two books and you haven't, you're already running the race from behind.
A few things that have stayed with me.
Technology wins wars
One idea I can't shake: the Romans didn't win because they were tougher, smarter, or louder. They won because they had better steel. A Roman sword cut clean through the other side's blade. Literally. Knowing how to work metal was the difference between living and dying.
Two thousand years later, not much has changed. The arms race still comes down to who has the better technology. Who iterates faster. Who has physics more on their side. The party that underestimates that, loses.
Physics does not care about hurt feelings
A line from somewhere in the book that I keep chewing on.
Feelings are feelings. They're real. They count. But if you're building a rocket and you let feelings override physics, your rocket burns. You end up somewhere else, doing something that matters less. For the things that really matter, you have to be able to step past it.
That isn't a permission slip to be an asshole. It's a reminder that reality doesn't negotiate.
Criticism loud, praise quiet
Another idea that stuck with me, about feedback. Criticism should be loud, and often. Good news can be said softly, and once is enough.
This is the opposite of how most managers operate. They whisper criticism and shout praise from the rooftops. The result is that nobody knows what's actually going wrong, and nobody takes the good news at face value when something is genuinely working.
You can teach skills. You can't teach attitude.
He used to hire very smart people who were terrible to be around. He doesn't anymore. Now he hires for attitude. Skills you can pick up along the way. Turning a bad attitude into something workable takes a brain transplant.
This sounds simple. In practice it's brutally hard, because it means short-term pain. A brilliant asshole delivers today. But two years from now, your team is wrecked and you're back at zero.
Where the smartest people go is where the win is
This might be the most important idea in the book so far. The company the smartest, most driven people want to work for is the one that's going to win. Not because money or marketing or distribution don't matter. They do. But everything else is downstream of who shows up.
Look at what's happening between Google and Anthropic. There's a massive brain drain leaving Google. Many more bright, interesting people are going from Google to Anthropic than the other way. That tells me more about the future of those two companies than any earnings report.
The same pattern is playing out between SpaceX and AST SpaceMobile. Who wants to work for the challenger that positions itself as "the smaller, safer choice"? The talent goes where it actually matters. SpaceX. Starlink. AST is left with the players who weren't picked first.
That isn't a small disadvantage. That's the whole game.
Read it
I'm at 26 percent and I already know enough to recommend this to any builder. Read it next to Naval. Both books can be downloaded for free. There's no excuse not to.
And if you don't, and your competitor does? You're leaving a massive opportunity on the table. For a few evenings of reading.
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