When Musk turned his attention to SolarCity, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), there were consequences:
He fired his cousins, who had focused on door-to-door sales schemes rather than making a good product. “I fucking hate my cousins,” he told Kunal Girotra, one of the four chiefs of Tesla Energy he hired and fired over the subsequent five years. “I don’t think I ever will ever speak to them again.”
He cycled through leaders by demanding miraculous growth in roof installations, giving them insane deadlines for delivering, and firing them when they didn’t.
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There were too many fasteners, he said. Each had to be nailed down, adding time to the installation process. Half should be deleted, he insisted. “Instead of two nails for each foot, try it with only one,” he ordered. “If the house has a hurricane, the whole neighborhood is fucked up, so who cares? One nail is going to be fine.” Someone protested that could lead to leaks. “Don’t worry about making it as waterproof as a submarine,” he said. “My house in California used to leak. Somewhere between sieve and submarine should be okay.”
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The tiles and railings were shipped to the sites packed in cardboard. That was wasteful. It took time to pack things and then unpack them. Get rid of the cardboard, he said, even at the warehouses.
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“We need to get the engineers who designed this system to come out here and see how hard it is to install,” he said angrily. Then he erupted. “I want to see the engineers out here installing it themselves. Not just doing it for five minutes. Up on roofs for days, for fucking days!”
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Why, he asked, did it take eight times longer to install a roof of solar tiles than one with regular tiles? One of the engineers, named Tony, began showing him all the wires and electronic parts. Musk already knew the workings of each component, and Tony made the mistake of sounding both assured and condescending. “How many roofs have you done?” Musk asked him.
“I’ve got twenty years of experience in the roof business,” Tony answered.
“But how many solar roofs have you installed?”
Tony explained he was an engineer and had not actually been on a roof doing the installation. “Then you don’t fucking know what you’re fucking talking about,” Musk responded. “This is why your roofs are shit and take so long to install.”
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At high noon the next day, it reached 97 degrees in the shade, of which there was none. Dow and his installers were on top of the house next door to the one they had done the previous day. Two of the installers succumbed to the heat and started vomiting, so Dow sent them home. Some of the rest attached battery fans to their safety vests. Per Musk’s instructions, they were using only one nail to hold down each foot of the tiles, but it wasn’t working well. The tiles were popping up and rotating. So the team began using two nails again.
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When Musk arrived at 9 p.m., they showed him why they needed a second nail, and he nodded. It was part of the algorithm: if you don’t end up having to restore 10 percent of the parts you deleted, then you didn’t delete enough.
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“Nice work, guys,” he said. “You should stopwatch each step. That will make it more fun, like a game.”
I asked him about his anger the previous evening. “It’s not my favorite way to fix things, but it worked,” he says. “The improvement from yesterday to today was gigantic. The big difference is that today the engineers were actually on the roof installing instead of at a keyboard.”
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The business of installing solar roofs is labor-intensive and doesn’t scale.
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Musk did not have the patience for such businesses.
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“You’ve got to cut costs,” he said. “You’ve got to show me a plan by next week to cut costs in half.” As before, Dow showed his enthusiasm. “Okay, let’s do it,” he said. “We’ll kick ass and cut costs.”
He spent all weekend working on a cost-cutting plan to present to Musk that Monday. But as soon as the meeting began, Musk changed the subject and grilled Dow about how many installations had been completed in the past week and details about personnel redeployments. Dow did not know some of the answers, and he protested that he had been working since his birthday on cost-cutting plans and not the details Musk was now asking about. “Thank you for trying,” Musk finally said. “But this isn’t cutting it.”
It took Dow a while to realize that Musk was firing him. “It was just the most bizarre, weird firing you could imagine,” Dow later says. “I had so much history with him, and deep down Elon knows that I have something special. He knows that I can kick ass, because we’d done it together in the past, in the Nevada battery factory. But he thought I was losing my edge, even though I had missed my birthday with my family to be up on that roof with him.”
I’d like to see this method applied to Musk’s own failures.
“How many electric cars have you waterproofed, Elon?”
“I’m a rocket production manager, I don’t actually waterproof the electric cars. Somewhere between sieve and submarine should be okay.”
“That’s why your electric cars can’t survive a simple automatic car wash.”