”The storm clouds building in his head burst,” Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), when Musk and a group of his top managers went down the road to the launchpad site and didn’t see anybody working:
This might not have seemed unusual to most people on a late Friday night, but Musk erupted. His immediate target was a tall, mild-mannered civil engineer named Andy Krebs, who was in charge of building the infrastructure at Starbase. “Why is no one working?” Musk demanded.
Unfortunately for Krebs, it was the first time in three weeks he didn’t have a full night shift working on the tower and launchpad. Soft-spoken with a hint of a stutter, he was tentative in his answers, which didn’t help. “What is the fucking problem?” Musk demanded. “I want to see activity.”
That’s when he ordered the surge. Starship’s booster and second stage, he said, should be rolled out of the manufacturing bays and stacked on the launchpad within ten days. He wanted five hundred workers from around SpaceX—Cape Canaveral, Los Angeles, Seattle—to be flown immediately to Boca Chica and thrown into the breach. “This is not a volunteer organization,” he said. “We are not selling Girl Scout cookies. Get them here now.” When he called Gwynne Shotwell, who was in bed in Los Angeles, to figure out what workers and supervisors would come to Boca Chica, she protested that the engineers at the Cape still had Falcon 9 launches to prepare for. Musk ordered them delayed. The surge was his priority.
Shortly after 1 a.m., Musk sent out an email titled “Starship Surge” to all SpaceX employees. “Anyone who is not working on other obviously critical path projects at SpaceX should shift immediately to work on the first Starship orbit,” he wrote. “Please fly, drive, or get here by any means possible.”
At Cape Canaveral, Kiko Dontchev, who won his spurs when Musk ignited a similar frenzy after seeing almost no one working on Pad 39A one night, began rousing his best workers to fly to Texas. Musk’s assistant Jehn Balajadia tried to get hotel rooms in nearby Brownsville, but most were booked for a border-control convention, so she scrambled to make arrangements for workers to sleep on air mattresses. Sam Patel worked through the night figuring out the reporting and supervising structures they would put in place—and also how to get enough food to Boca Chica to feed everyone.
[…]
The surge was successful. In just over ten days, the booster and spacecraft of Starship were stacked on the launchpad. It was also a bit pointless. The rocket was not yet capable of flying, and stacking it did not force the FAA to rush its approval. But the ginned-up crisis pushed the team to remain hardcore, and it provided Musk with a bit of the drama that his headspace craves.
Crack dat whip, Playa.
Accomplishment needs a degree of panic; that’s why they are called “deadlines.”
But too much “hurry up and wait” can be corrosive.