What Is Elon Musk's Five-step Algorithm?

David Senra, reading Elon Musk, says the algorithm is a five-step process for engineering that every one of Musk's companies has to follow, and the order is the point. Make the requirements less dumb. Try very hard to delete the part or process. Simplify or optimize. Accelerate. Automate.

Musk has run the steps backwards many times. Many things at Tesla were automated, accelerated, simplified, and then deleted. Question the requirements first, or you can get the perfect answer to the wrong question. The requirements are definitely dumb, no matter who gave them, and each one has to come from a person who takes responsibility for it, not from a department. He has dug into dumb requirements and found that nobody still working in the department agreed with them.

Delete next, because people forget to try removing something entirely. If deleted things are not being added back about 10 percent of the time, at least one in 10, you are not deleting enough. At SpaceX he called it a deletion rampage: nothing is sacred, go ultra hardcore on deletion and simplification, and put immense effort into reducing mass. Only after that do you simplify or optimize. Otherwise you are optimizing a thing that should not exist. Only then do you accelerate cycle time. You can always go faster, but not until the first three steps are done.