For years Elon and Tesla never spent any money on advertising.
They focused instead on investing in R&D and design since these aspects of business help make the products as good as possible.
“I ask myself: Will this activity result in a better product or service? If not, I stop those efforts.”
There are grey areas like “Is a Tesla sign design an ad?” but ultimately the important takeaway is how money invested into design and manufacturing is a far better value than money burned on ads that do not significantly move a company forward.
Elon has created Billions of dollars in growth by focusing his investments and then exercising control to accelerate growth.
Here’s a quote from Elon talking with Inc. on the subject:
“It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.”
Speaking of focus, a powerful statement Elon shared at the USC commencement address he gave is to:
“Focus on signal over noise. A lot of companies get confused. They spend money on things that don’t actually make the product better.
For example at Tesla we’ve never spent any money on advertising. We put all of the money into R&D and manufacturing and design to try to make the car as good as possible.
And I think that’s the way to go.
For any given company just keep thinking about are these efforts that people expending are they resulting in a better product or service, and if they are not, stop those efforts.“
Fueled by Interest: The Secret to Elon Musk’s 100-Hour Work Weeks.
If I did not have a passion for Elon Musk and the businesses he magnetizes I would have had a much harder time writing so many posts about him.
Since Elon is so fantastically fascinating to me I have found the energy to pour into these pages, and plenty of content from the interesting tips he’s shared.
Here’s a timeless Elon quote that speaks to the importance of liking what you do:
“Really liking what you do in whatever area that you get into, even if you’re the best of the best there’s always a chance of failure, so I think it’s important that you really like whatever you’re doing. If you don’t like it, life is too short.
If you like what you’re doing you think about it even when you’re not working, it’s something that your mind is drawn to, and if you don’t like it you just really can’t make it work I think.“
When you really like what you do it enables you to find the energy to persist through the challenges that a growing business will undoubtedly face.
The more competitive you decide to be, the greater your odds are for victory.
Really liking what you do enables the obsession needed to ignore the hate and find great ways to dominate.
Don’t spread yourself thin: Go all in on something you really like…
Then obsess over it so you can optimize everything you do and dominate your market.
Caffeine, Showers, and Steak: Inside Elon’s Sleep and Daily Rituals
In an interview with AutoBild and more recently (Dec 2025 / Katie Miller Podcast) Elon shed some light on what his morning routine and sleep habits are like.
When asked what time he goes to be and wakes up Elon replied:
“I wake up at about 7am. But I go to bed late. I usually go to bed around 1am or so.”
For breakfast Elon said “I think it’s probably true that having a good breakfast is a good idea but usually I don’t have time for that so sometimes it’s made for me but probably half the time I don’t have breakfast. I just have like coffee or something like that…
I’m trying to cut down on sweet stuff and I think I probably should have an omelette and a coffee or something like that. That seems like probably the right thing and sometimes I do have that.”
These days (2025) he claims to have Steak and Eggs he said near the end of the Katie Miller podcast.
In another interview Elon was asked how much sleep he gets and he said:
“Sometimes not enough (sleep). Sleep is really great because I find if I don’t get enough sleep then I’m quite grumpy. I think most people are that way…
I found that I could get less sleep and sustain it but I would get less done because mental acuity would suffer. So I found generally the right number for me is around six to six and a half hours on average per night.”
Clearly Elon’s sleep schedule and morning habits align with his fierce work ethic. He has slept on the factory floor at Tesla on a number of occasions, with iron filings in the air. In another video he shared where he would sleep on the floor occasionally in a board room as the couch was too thin.
There is power and productivity potential to be produced optimizing your sleep.
To Paraphrase Ben Franklin: “Being early to bed and early to rise will help make you healthy, wealthy and wise.”
Fewer hours lost to sleeping means more hours for productive work, and with more working hours you can accomplish far more than if you were less diligent about your sleep.
Elon caught some flack for sharing the fact he sometimes takes Ambien to get to sleep but try to imagine how much he has on his mind.
Elon on Joe Rogan described his brain like a never ending explosion of ideas so I don’t blame him for taking some medication when needed so he can optimize his sleep.
Daily Rituals
On a reddit AMA (Ask me Anything) the most upvoted question was: “What daily habit do you believe has the largest positive impact on your life?”
Elon replied with a one word answer: “Showering.”
Pretty simple answer but when you think about it the advice is strong. A shower not only gets you feeling and smelling fresh for the day it also wakes you up and makes you ready for action.
Also, showering before bed can help you sleep.
Clearly daily rituals are working well for Elon so if you are running lean on sleep like he does try showering first thing to wake your body up, alert your mind, and start your day off right.
Elon values his time highly and manages it well. “Time is the ultimate currency.” is one of my favorite Elon tweets.
When you put in twice as many working hours as someone else, you will have the opportunity to gain more momentum and a competitive advantage.
With more momentum you can get twice as much done as someone else, or even much more.
As someone who has sold new cars for a living in the past, I have felt the friction of a customer who feels tense about making a purchase…
And undoubtedly part of the reason is because I earned commissions so there was an incentive for me to be assertive about making the sale.
Elon explains how Tesla has a better way:
“Our sales people are not on commission and will never pressure you to buy a car.
Their goal and the sole metric of theory success is to have you enjoy the experience of visiting so much that you look forward to returning again.“
This approach removes the tension from the sales process and helps add an element of trust knowing the sales people are simply there to help any way they can.
When I went for a test drive I was given a gift of Perrier from the front trunk of a car and a granola bar. It made for a very friendly experience and I do intend to go back to the dealership again to test drive the Cybertruck and FSD.
These are three of the many fun products Elon and his companies have created.
Elon is not afraid to have fun with the products he sells, and how he promotes them.
Elon often has fun with his Twitter bio, for example. His Twitter bio has said “Meme necromancer” and “Former CEO of Dogecoin” before.
He’s also co-hosted a Meme review show on YouTube and often posts savage memes on Twitter.
One video of Elon has him standing on top of a giant SpaceX ball of liquid oxygen saying: “Here we are on top of a giant ball of liquid oxygen. They say SpaceX has big balls and it’s true.”
Elon has a great sense of humor and is great at integrating fun into the products his companies sell.
With Tesla a couple examples include the customizable horn, which can choose between a standard horn sound, or you can choose: Farts, goat, snake, applause, and more. The more option enables you to upload whatever sound you want to use for the horn.
Other fun Tesla options include: Romance Mode, which will display a video of wood logs on a fire and plays romantic music.
Build fun into your products and you can’t go wrong.
Party/Camper mode is also coming soon.
Elon said in a tweet: “We’re adding a “party & camper mode” soon to S/3/X, so your car can maintain air flow, temp, selective lights, music & power devices for 48 hours or more while parked. Big batteries rock…”
Wikipedia: An Easter egg is a term used to describe a message, image, or feature hidden in a video game, film, or other, usually in electronics, medium.
Tesla has a number of fun Easter eggs integrated into their products.
To be specific Wikipedia currently has a page dedicated to them and lists 17 unique and fun easter eggs.
Some of these Easter eggs get the car to play music and do a light show, featuring the Falcon wing doors on the Model X.
Others take inspiration from Back to The Future, Rick and Morty, Mario Kart, James Bond, or Monty Python.
One of the latest features enables Tesla owners to choose from a variety of horn sounds, and includes the ability to add a custom horn sound if you wish.
All of these features have one awesome thing in common: Fun.
Make your business fun and more people will talk about it.
There are many ways to make your business more fun so feel free to be creative with what you do.
My Dad, Peter, built a Plinko style game his HVAC business uses at trade shows to give prizes to customers. This works well as an ice breaker and helps the sales team to generate new leads.
At the xAi Christmas party in 2025 they had robots in a cage match boxing each other.
Having fun and being part of a fun promotion is a great way to get people interested in your company and promoting it with word of mouth marketing for free.
Fun and Tesla Games
Tesla vehicles come with a number of games built into their infotainment system.
With full self-driving autonomy on the verge of widespread adoption Elon says entertainment will become increasingly important once more cars become fully self-driving.
This will keep passengers entertained during long trips when the mental task of driving the vehicle is no longer required.
Elon has described a Tesla as “A computer with wheels” and as time goes on they are looking more and more like a gaming computer on wheels, which is good news for all of the gamers out there.
The Mobile Arcade: Tesla’s infotainment system is already a gamer’s paradise, but this is just the beginning.
The FSD Shift: As autonomy frees us from the steering wheel, Elon predicts entertainment will become the primary cabin experience.
Engineering Joy: From custom horn sounds to hidden Easter eggs, Teslas are designed to prioritize “Fun” as a core metric.
The Bottom Line: Expect the future of Tesla to look less like a vehicle and more like a rolling entertainment suite.
Elon even joked about being “The king of car farts” since the horn on a Tesla can be customized for any sound you want, like a whoopie cushion.
Tesla’s are engineered to be super fun machines so in the future expect many fun Tesla innovations to come.
Build It Like Elon: The Secret to Creating Products That Sell Themselves
Creating an amazing product is one of the strongest types of marketing there is.
Word of mouth marketing is a remarkable form of influencer marketing and it remains powerful to this day.
Influencers, the media, and everyone in between are all human beings. And the best way to get them to spread the word about your company for free is to develop an incredible product or service that amazes and delights.
Apple is an example of this. Although Apple certainly does not shy away from advertising their marketing would fall flat if their products and design were not high quality.
Elon explains how for him it is not about the companies, it is about creating compelling products and services, and companies are the means to this end.
In an interview with the Babylon Bee Elon elaborates:
“It’s not like I care about starting companies. Like is there is a very compelling product or service that’s the thing that is important, not the company. A company is just an assemblage of people to create a compelling product or service. And if a company does not provide great products or services it should not exist.”
So relentlessly strive to improve the product or service you have to offer.
When media outlets start talking about how your product is the best you’ll know you are on the right track.
Elon recommends CEO’s “Spend less time with finance and in conference rooms and on powerpoint and spend more time trying to make your product as amazing as possible.”
“Make your product better. That is what really matters.”
Step 1: “Have You Tried? Like really tried.”
Step 2: “Try Harder”
This reminds me of one of my favorite Elon quotes of all time, which he shared with a bunch of high schoolers who he did a Hack Club ask me anything video chat with. Elon said:
“You’ve got to try. Believe in yourself and try. People can do way more than they think.”
Be an absolute perfectionist about the product you produce or the service you provide.
As I write this I just put down my phone and stopped a doom scroll on Christmas to shift my attention to Elonology. Because I’m taking Elon’s advice to Try Harder and do what is necessary to make this book great.
The company that invests the most effort and produces the most beneficial innovations is likely to win long term.
Embrace Risk and Rapid Cycles: Building the Future Like Elon.
The decisions Elon makes may appear risky to others but because of the setup of his companies he is able to roll out innovations on the fly.
Fast decisions give Elon’s companies an edge because either they improve, or they learn, and this helps innovation.
Elon’s companies have an edge whereas entrenched management in legacy companies cannot keep up due to managerial lag.
Too often people are paralyzed by fear and suffer from analysis paralysis.
Without an element of risk a great reward is rarely found.
There is risk of company decay and death when no action is taken at all.
Safe is risky and risky is safe.
Innovation is how you win and innovation requires a degree of action taking risk.
But avoiding innovation is a bigger risk. Innovation requires a focus on what could be rather than what already is.
Elon has said “What matters is the rate of innovation.”
“What exactly is innovation?” you might be wondering.
At Tesla AI day Elon explained: “In general innovation is how many iterations and what is the average progress between each iteration. And so if you can reduce the time between iterations the rate of improvement is much better.”
Innovating more effectively and rapidly than your competition gives your business the best chance of success…
So always be “risk taking” and innovating!
The faster your rate of innovation the faster your business will rise in power and capture market share.
Tesla has been innovating faster than other car companies and the compounding effect of all of these innovations are an essential part of the reason why Tesla is now the most valuable car company with no signs of slowing down.
Amazon has been innovating more than Wal-Mart and this makes it clear how Amazon has been gaining market share from Wal-Mart.
Innovation is future focused and being future focused is key if you want a more fantastic future.
Elon certainly is and says:
“I think within the next five years we will see the electrification of aircrafts. First propeller, then turboprop, then jet engines.”
“What is important is that we establish a self-sustaining city on Mars so the future of consciousness and life as we know it can survive.”
Elon goes on about innovation in an interview with Offshore Northern Seas.
“Establish an expectation of innovation, and the compensation structure must reflect that…there must also be an allowance for failure because if you are trying something new, necessarily there is some chance it will not work. If you punish people too much for failure they will respond accordingly and the innovation you get will not be very incrementalist.”
So keep thinking ahead because the future is where we’ll be spending the rest of our lives.
The Musk Method: How First Principles Built SpaceX and Tesla.
In his interview with Kevin Rose, Elon explains his thoughts about reasoning up from first principles.
“Boil things down to the most fundamental truths. Then reason up from there…
Thinking about things in the limit of high and low…
Thinking of things in hypothesis…
The scientific principle essentially.
These things are incredibly important in all arenas…
Most people tend to think by analogy or by comparison of something that already exists…
And that is sort of a mental shortcut.” “First principles thinking is saying OK what are the most fundamental truths that we know about any situation…
The things that are at a very granular level the building blocks that we are most convinced are true…
And then you reason up from those most fundamental axioms.”
“Cogent thinking would be another way to refer to it as.”
“Do they lead to a conclusion?”
“What is the probability associated with that conclusion?…because reality is really probability. It’s not deterministic; One or the other.”
In an interview with the University of California Television (UCTV) Elon said:
The way I tend to view problems is from a physics standpoint. I think Physics is a good analytical framework and one of the key things in Physics is to reason from first principles.
To reason from first principles is contrary to the way most human reasoning takes place, which is by analogy.
Reasoning from first principles means you figure out what are the fundamental truths, or that people are pretty sure are fundamental truths, and can you build up to a conclusion from that.
And if you come up with some idea and it appears to violate one of those fundamental truths then you’re probably wrong or you should get a really big prize or something like that.
This may seem sort of obvious when it’s explained but it’s actually not what people do.
Reasoning by analogies is helpful because it’s a shortcut, and it’s mostly correct, but it tends to be most incorrect when you’re dealing with new things. Because it’s hard to analogize to something really new.”
To give an example of using first principles thinking at a talk Elon gave at the Oxford Martin School he explained how first principles thinking to rocket building.
The way first principles thinking applies to rocketry and improving the ability to create orbital rockets is to say:
(Rocket Example)
“OK well: What are the materials that go into a rocket? How much does each material constituent weigh? What’s the cost of that raw material? And that’s going to set some floor. As to the cost of the rocket.
And that actually turns out to be a relatively small number, something well under five percent of the cost of a rocket. And in some cases closer to one or two percent.
That’s the magic wand number. So if you have piles of raw material on the floor. And you just wave a magic wand. And rearrange them. Then that would be the best case scenario for a rocket.
So I was able to see well there’s clearly a great deal of room for improvement, even if you consider rockets to be expendable.
So that’s sort of what I mean by thinking about things from first principles standpoint.
If on the other hand I analyzed it by analogy and said ok well what are all other rocket companies, what do their rockets costs. What historically have other rockets cost. And that would be sort of an analogy thing but it does not illustrate what the true potential is.
And so a first principles approach is a good way to understand what new things are possible, so this is a good framework.
That doesn’t mean you will be successful but at least you can determine if success is one of the possibilities that is important I think.
Clearly using first principles thinking is powerful.
Although Elon might not have a “magic wand” he certainly has been able to drastically improve the cost of launching rockets to orbit.
First principles thinking is fundamental to Elon’s success.
And first principles thinking can be fundamental to your thinking too…
So reason up from first principles and strive for a market leadership position by doing so.
