Elon Musk’s Engineering Principles – The 5 Step Process

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2024-11-19 06:00:05

There’s this interview with Elon Musk, showing around the SpaceX rocket production facility in Texas. There’s a lot of talk about rockets and stuff, though in between he’s giving some fascinating insights into the design process and the principles he’s following. The “5 Step Process” as he calls it. Wanted to write it up for myself, so I though I can share it here as well.

The following is a collection of what’s said during the interview, content composed from the subtitles. Did slight adjustments for readability.

You’re moving too slow, go faster. But don’t go faster until you’ve worked on the other three things first. If you’re digging your grave, don’t dig it faster, stop digging your grave.

I have personally made the mistake of going backwards on all five steps multiple times. Literally I automated, accelerated, simplified and then deleted. Automating was a mistake. Accelerating was mistake. Optimizing was a mistake. We just deleted and just bypassed this $2 million robot cell as a complete pile of nonsense.