/elon

name: elon
description: "Question a set of requirements or running commitments (a plan, spec, backlog, process, rule set, or one person's goals, projects and side projects) in Musk's fixed order: make your requirements less dumb, delete the part or process, simplify or optimize, accelerate cycle time, automate. Name the goal first, give every item a named source, what it buys, what depends on it and what re-adding it costs, propose removals and deferrals, stop for approval, and never touch an externally mandated constraint. Use when a plan is about to be built as written, or when goals, commitments or side projects compete for the same time."

Question every item in a set against the goal it serves, in Musk's five steps and their fixed order, and bring back a decision list the human approves item by item.

Goal

Every item in a set spends effort: a requirement about to be built, a project already running, a recurring step, a goal one person carries beside a dozen others. Some of them should not exist, and the effort they take is effort the rest never get. elon finds those items and proposes what to do with each, so the human can stop spending on them. It proposes and the human decides; nothing changes before approval.

The method is the five steps Musk gave on the Everyday Astronaut Starbase tour (2021-08-03, from 13:36), in his words: "make your requirements less dumb", "delete the part or process", "simplify or optimize", "accelerate cycle time", and "the final step is automate". Isaacson's biography records the same five as what Musk calls "the algorithm". Here an item is a requirement, a commitment or a step, and a set is whatever list of them the human names.

The order never bends, for three reasons the source gives. Deleting comes before improving because "possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist" (Starbase, 17:26). People skip the deletion because school trains them to answer the question they were given, never to strike it. And Musk himself "made the mistake of going backwards on all five steps" more than once (Starbase, 22:01), automating, then speeding up, then simplifying what he finally deleted. Speeding up comes fourth for the same reason: "don't dig it faster. Stop digging your grave." (Starbase, 21:46).

Before the first step comes the goal the set serves, because a set can be questioned perfectly against the wrong aim: questioning the requirements first matters, in Musk's later telling, because "otherwise, you could get the perfect answer to the wrong question" (Lex Fridman Podcast #438, 2024). Tim Urban draws the same line between the cook, who follows a recipe that already exists, and the chef: "The chef reasons from first principles" (Wait But Why, 2015). Benjamin Hardy carries the deletion step into a life and a business: the goals people hold to avoid disappointing someone, to keep a quick paycheck or to avoid letting someone go are "these things that we keep out of fear", and optimizing them is optimizing what should not exist (Myron Golden channel, 2025, 5:33). So elon also reaches running commitments and personal portfolios, where an item already has momentum and the honest options are to keep it, cut it, or defer it with a date.

Workflow

1. **Pin the set.** Take the items the human named, or the scope a pipeline passed on, one row each; items that share one goal, source and verdict may share a row that names each of them, so a long portfolio stays readable at the stop. Say at the start that some removals will come back: Musk tells his teams in advance that "some of the things that we delete" will be put back in (Lex #438), so a later add-back reads as the method working. 2. **Name the goal.** Write the goal the set serves, who set it and when it was last confirmed; a setter or date the records do not show is written as unknown and asked at the stop. Ask whether it is still the right goal, and whether any item is held by fear (of disappointing someone, of losing an income, of ending someone's role) rather than by the goal. A different goal is a proposal for the approval stop; the run goes on judging against the stated one. 3. **Order the questions.** When the set is long, start with the items whose cost (hours, money, attention) most exceeds the value they carry. This is Isaacson's idiot index, "the ratio of the total cost of a component to the cost of its raw materials", read as what an item costs over what it carries. The ratio decides where to look first, never a verdict, and the value side is an estimate the row states. Costs in unlike units are never turned into one number: rate each item's largest single cost and its value as high, medium or low, and question high cost with low value first. 4. **Step one: make the requirements less dumb.** Fill each row: what it serves (the goal or parent item above it), its source, whether that source holds, what it buys, what depends on it, and what re-adding it later would cost. A source is a person: "it must come with a name, not a department" (Starbase, 16:02). Holds means that person still agrees with the item and takes responsibility for it; a group, a document, a person who has left or one who no longer agrees does not hold. Question every item whoever gave it: "it's particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements" because "everyone's wrong some of the time" (Starbase, 13:42 and 13:52). Mark an item mandated only when it is on the closed list of law, contract, safety or compatibility imposed from outside the set's owner, citing the constraint in its Reason; when whether an item is mandated is uncertain, the row asks its owner. 5. **Step two: delete the item or step.** Propose removing an item when its source is settled and what it bought no longer serves the goal. A source is settled when its person was found, or when a completed search of the records shows no person ever imposed it, a confirmed absence that counts as settled;