‘Walk out of a meeting’: Elon Musk’s six rules for staff resurfaces

Eccentric advice for workers follows furore around dogecoin buying by Tesla founder

Tesla workers are warned against “acronyms or nonsense words” and encouraged to “walk out” of time wasting meetings, in rules allegedly established by founder Elon Musk.

The six lessons for staffers, as reported by electric vehicle (EV) website Electrek in 2018, was ridiculed by Twitter users for telling workers to “follow logic, not rules”, and for all-round eccentricity.

The rules were allegedly part of an email from Mr Musk addressing the temporary suspension of Tesla production lines to upgrade equipment – with aims of producing 6,000 Model 3 cars a week.

The firm now produces roughly 163,660 Model 3 cars a month at its factory in California, in addition to 16,097 of its Model S series.

Fortunately, the six rules resurfaced this week following the rapid rise of dogecoin’s share price – the meme-inspired cryptocurrency favoured by the Tesla founder.

Mr Musk, who recently referred to himself as “the Dogefather”, reportedly purchased more than a billion in bitcoin through Tesla, the electric vehicle company he founded in 2003, earlier this year.

Tens of thousands are thought to work for Tesla, all of whom are expected to abide by the six rules below:

1. No big meetings

“Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get [out] of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.”

2. And no frequent meetings too

“Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.”

3. Leave a meeting if you're not contributing

“Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.”

4. No nonsense words

“Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorise a glossary just to function at Tesla.”

5. Communicate directly with everyone

“Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the ‘chain of command’. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.

“A major source of issues is poor communication between departments. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between departments, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.”

6. Follow logic, not rules

“In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a ‘company rule’ is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.”