#415 How Elon Thinks

Founders

David Senra

History, Entrepreneurship, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2026

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

My friend Eric Jorgenson spent years—and thousands of hours—studying Elon Musk. Eric read everything Elon has written, read everything written about Elon, and watched every interview Elon's given. He distilled all of Elon's insights into his new book. This episode is all about How Elon Thinks based on The Book of Elon: Elon Musk's Most Useful Ideas in His Own Words. Episode sponsors: Ramp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud ⁠⁠⁠by going to Ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money⁠⁠, and grow revenue.⁠ Automate compliance, security, and trust with Vanta.⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Vanta helps you win trust, close deals, and stay secure—faster and with less effort⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠Find out how increased security leads to more customers by going to Vanta⁠⁠⁠. Tell them David from Founders sent you and you'll get $1000 off.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My friend Eric Jorgensen has spent a few years and thousands and thousands of hours reading
0:05.5	everything that Elon has written, reading everything that it has written about Elon, watching
0:10.6	every single interview that Elon has ever given. And then he compiled all of Elon's most
0:17.1	useful ideas into the book that I'm holding my hand, which is the book of Elon the subtitles Elon's most useful ideas in his own words. I'm going to read one line from
0:26.3	Eric about the benefit that he experienced from doing this, and then from here on out, every other
0:31.2	thing will be Elon in his own words. Eric writes, to me, Elon represents the idea that I am
0:37.3	capable of more than I ever imagined.
0:40.8	And so I'm just going to run through in chronological order all the notes and highlights I took from
0:45.3	reading and rereading this book. The idea is I want this to feel as if Elon is speaking directly to
0:50.1	you and I. So it starts out. Elon says, I don't mind if my legacy is accurate or inaccurate.
0:54.8	As long as I die feeling I've done the right thing for the future of consciousness.
0:59.4	Elon gives a lot of advice centered around making sure that you're living a useful life, building things that make other people's lives better as the way I think about this.
1:07.1	He says, you can choose to not be ordinary. You can choose not to conform to the conventions taught to you by your parents. It's possible for ordinary people to choose to be
1:14.9	extraordinary. Be useful. The measure of success in my life is how many useful things can I get
1:20.3	done? I wake up in the morning and ask, how can I be useful today? I want to maximize my utility.
1:26.5	I try to take the set of actions most likely to improve the
1:28.9	probability that the future will be good. Do useful things for your fellow human beings. It is hard
1:35.2	to be useful to contribute more than you consume. Can you have a positive net contribution to
1:40.7	society? Aim for that. I have a lot of respect for someone who puts in an
1:45.9	honest day's work to do useful things. I admire anyone making a positive contribution to humanity.
1:52.1	And then Elon was asked the question, like, how do you know if you're helping? And I liked his
1:54.7	answer here. How many people did you help multiplied by how much help you provided each person on
	...

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