Dennis Kneale - BOOK - The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Heyto five the fifty five karase De Talk Station. Happy Friday, Eve,
Great time to be tuned into the fifty five Parassee
Morning Show, which would argue it always is. But I
am pleased to welcome to the fifty five Fatasey Morning Show.
Someone the many of my listeners probably already know Dennis Neil,
Award winning journalist, media strategist, advisor to senior executives. A
lot of my listeners maybe listened to his What's Bugging Me? Podcast.

(00:22):
He was formerly the anchor at CNBC and Fox Business Network.
After serving as man My Favorite Newspaper, senior editor at
The Wall Street Journal, as well as managing editor of Forbes.
He helped write The Wealth Management of Wall Street Insider
on the Dirty Secrets of Financial Advisors and How to
Protect Your Portfolio. Author of the book we're going to
be talking about today, the leadership genius of Elon Musk.

(00:43):
Welcome to the Morning Show, Dennis Neil. It is a
distinct pleasure to have you on my program.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Same here, Brian, and thanks so much for that very loquacious.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
Kind intro.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
You're well deserving of it. You do great work and
you have been for a long time and a little
jealousy on my part because I dearly love the Wall
Street Journal, and I'm so glad it's one of the
few papers that's still in business and speaking about business,
Elon Musk, the wealthiest guy on the planet and immune
from the class warfare arguments. He's a minimalist. He doesn't

(01:15):
own all kinds of stuff and things. I mean, you
see these billionaires and there are five hundred million dollar
yachts floating around the world, and you're thinking like, wow,
uh okay, but that's not Elon Musk. He almost he
like thrives on minimalism and that's part of his business
strategy and what made him so successful.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Am I right, Yeah, You're totally right. That's a very
good ie on your part. You know, my book offers
eleven lessons of Elon that fuel his success and that
maybe we could use.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
To build a better life.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
And lesson number two is reduce, reduce, reduce.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
And that's what he's doing a doge.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
That's what he did at Twitter, cutting eighty percent of
staff in about two weeks. That's what he does in
the Tesla car where he tells engineers to take out
so many parts, reducing it that it can't run.

Speaker 3 (02:03):
They got to put something back in.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
So the Tesla has about ten thousand parts in the
ford has I think it's thirty or forty thousand parts
in a ford and so that runs across. He sold
all his homes, six homes, for like one hundred and
twenty million dollars.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
And he believes in mind with lifestyle.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
At the same time, once that guy moved into mar
A Lago for a few weeks with Trump, I imagine
Trump was wondering, is he ever going to leave? He
does stay in the lap of luxury with friends.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Well, with friends, they've invited him into their multimillion arm
dollar homes, not his. He lives in a tiny house,
doesn't he is?

Speaker 3 (02:36):
Does he owner?

Speaker 2 (02:37):
It's this forty thousand dollars foldable house that he rents
that SpaceX bought from this company that specializes in it,
and it's a you know, it's just a tiny little thing.
And when he's in town for SpaceX launches and stuff,
he'll stay there.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
Well, and as you you point out in the book,
he adheres to this eighty twenty rule. The perception is
that eighty percent of the work done by twenty percent
of the staff, which he proved when he acquired X
and in his motivation for acquiring it, I don't think
was to make himself any better or anything, but it
was in the name of freedom of speech, which he
holds dearly. But getting rid of that.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Was the most amazing thing, Brian, because this guy's an
adopted American.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
You know that a third of America, Americans, they believe
that hate speech is so bad that it's more important
to prevent hate speech and stop it than it is
to have free speech. And another third of Americans not sure.
That's terrible. But Elon Musk because he is an adopted American,
he has the zeal of the convert right, and he

(03:40):
loves the First Amendment and lesson six in my book,
it's one lesson per chapter. Is free speech is everything
stand up and be heard.

Speaker 3 (03:49):
Not enough of.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Us stood up and pushed back when the nation was
tilted toward craziness for the last four years or even
longer if you want to trace back to Obama in
the eight years there and free speech, and he really
believes in it, and it's cost him dearly. You know,
no other entrepreneur Brian puts billions of dollars of his
own money into a new venture. That's that's for other

(04:10):
people to do that you use other people's money. But
he took I think it was twenty five billion of
the forty four billion he paid for Twitter came out
of his own pocket. And it was down sixty percent
after a year, and all the media said.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
He's destroying it. And today don't you think it's.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
One of the most important media platforms in the world.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
It is.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
And we just had a terrible illustration of the of
why you I mean, we need to protect free speech,
and all speech is protected in the United States, including
idiot Nazis on a bridge and even Deeugh here locally,
and you know, you got to defend the rights of
individuals to peaceably congregate as well as spread their message.
But the great thing about that is when you have

(04:49):
free speech and people espouse craziness, you can call them
out on it. And the left, in their right their
constant narrative that they're right and all of these woke
ideological rules are right. And that's the the only thing
that can be projected prevents alternative thought from being interjected
into the exchange. So logic and reason can rule today,

(05:09):
So you got to put up with stupid messages. But
that's where you find out where the stupid people.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
Are exactly, And instead of trying to limit and muzzle
bad speech, simply drown it out with more of your own,
really really.

Speaker 3 (05:23):
Good speech, you know.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
I mean, it's just awful that our politicians on both
sides of the parties. You know, there's the Twitter files.
I was a journalist with more than thirty years and
the biggest scandal I've ever seen in my life. Yeah,
and the Twitter files, And I wonder, where the hell
is the media?

Speaker 3 (05:39):
Why aren't they more upset about this?

Speaker 2 (05:41):
I did more columns on the Twitter files and the
scandal of government suppression of the First Amendment rights of
thousands and millions of people. I did more stories than
the New York Times in Washington Posts combined. And then
you see what they're doing with dough and you see
millions of dollars in payments to journalistic outfit.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
I think they said there's something like six.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
Thousand journalists getting some kind of money from USAID. And
you suddenly wonder where you bought off? Is that why
you said nothing didn't care? No, they didn't care because
it was conservative speech. But the Trump administration Brian, they
requested during their reign the fifty five hundred accounts be silenced.
So Republicans and Democrats alike will stifle speech if we

(06:23):
let them, if they let them.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
Elon Musk has just blown a huge hole in that
effort to stifle speech.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
Dennis Near, the author the leadership genius of Elon Musk,
I think, if I could read the concept of this
book correctly, you wrote it not just for everybody, but
it seems that you wrote it for entrepreneurs, business people,
folks that are trying to improve the function of their
own business and bring about some greater success for themselves.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
Bingo, absolutely, because I really think even though he operates
at a huge scale, there are lessons you can learn.
You know, always better on yourself and double down. He
kept doing that again and again and again. It's better
to launch and burn, yeah, than it is never to
launch at all. Five one failure, yeah. So there's a
lot of advice there for anybody trying to build a
better career or build a company.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
Well, and I'm glad you brought up it's better to
launch than burn and burn than never to launch at all,
because I was going to ask you about that Elon Musk.
You know, the rockets always didn't always fly, you know,
sometimes you send one up and it crashes and burns
to the ground. Now, some might take experience Shodenfreuda because
they don't like Elon Musk for some reason. But he
always seemed to take it and stride. He would chuckle

(07:30):
about it and use that as a learning opportunity.

Speaker 3 (07:35):
Exactly.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
You know, you have you know, I had that devastating
I was fired from Fox Business Network and fifteen minutes notice, security.

Speaker 3 (07:42):
Guard escorted me out out of the office. You'll pick
up we'll ship your stuff to you. I mean, it
was devastating.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
It was as if I'd slept with the president's wife
or something at the network. And how do you even
recover from that? You know, it's kind of tough. And
I forgot where I was going with that, Brian, in.

Speaker 3 (07:59):
Terms of the outcome that came out of that. Actually
I forgot that point. Well go ahead, you didn't stop.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
You had a bump in the road, you know, And
I tell you, in my life, the worst things that
happened to me have turned out to be the most
beneficial things.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
You're like, you know.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
I dated this girl in college and I thought I
was in love with her. It didn't work out, and
law and behold, I ended up meeting my now there
will be thirty three years in June wife in law school,
and I was like, man, I look back, and I think,
how miserable would I be as a human being had
that quote relationships quote unquote worked out.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
We have to learn that even in the most horrible
things that happened to us in our lives, good things
can come out of them.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
When I got escorted.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
Out of that building, I met a few days later
with a CEO and I told him, the thing is,
I feel awful because I feel like I failed. And
he said to me, you haven't failed, you learned. And
that's exactly how Elon looks at every failure.

Speaker 3 (08:55):
You know, the space that's took, you know, a couple
dozen explosions.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
Covered heavily in the press, laughing at him, making fun
of them, and every time they gained thousands of new
insights and made hundreds of changes to the next iteration.
Just fix it on a fly, keep going, keep going,
and just I love that about him. Yes, the guy
could have left after his first twenty five million dollar score,
and he just kept going.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
He kept going, and now that's the last best hope
for those stranded astronauts. Apparently we need to rely on
Elon Musk to get him back because apparently Boeing's not
capable of doing it. Now, I want you to dive
on into this because some people may not know this
about Elon Musk, but his philosophy of life drives a
lot of his decision making. And so let's talk about this.

(09:39):
All may be fake, so just go for it.

Speaker 3 (09:42):
Yes, I love this part.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
And the publisher, the wonderful Harper Collins Broadside Books, kind
of warned me, you know, you may not want to
lead with.

Speaker 3 (09:49):
That because it's so weird.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
But Elon truly believes I think he truly believes this.
That the odds are billions to one in favor of
the idea that right now, even as we speak, we
are living inside one or more massive computer simulations operated
by someone else, somewhere else.

Speaker 3 (10:05):
Maybe in another time.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
And at the more I started to look into this,
the more I came to things that it's actually quite plausible. Yes,
exactly like the matrix. I mean, if we look at
how pong and this is the explanation.

Speaker 3 (10:19):
Elon uses me, look.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
At pong, two little paddles and a ball and a
black screen against it. I played against and that was
only fifty years ago. And you look at where we
are now, where you're down in the three d Mays,
and it looks so super realistic. The thought that ten
thousand years from now you could have a simulation so
good you don't even know it. That's entirely believable. But
then you think that the Earth is almost four billion

(10:41):
years old. That means you have something like four hundred
thousand different sets of ten thousand years. Well, really, in
four hundred thousand different chances of ten thousand years, we've
never made it to that advanced thing.

Speaker 3 (10:54):
It's only in the next ten thousand years that we'll
get there. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Maybe it is a little simulated, but then what it
does for us is if you think it might be plausible, well.

Speaker 3 (11:04):
Then you live louder, you love out loud, You.

Speaker 2 (11:08):
Take that job that you're too afraid to take because
there's too much risk there. You say that thing in
a meeting because you're feeling like everyone's going in the
wrong direction, because you no longer are going to stay
clients because what the heck, it all may be a
game anyway.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah, that's a real wild way of looking at it,
you know. And it's one of my favorite quotes. And
it's interesting because I just put it up the other
day because one of my friends had said, what's your
favorite quote? I said, twenty years from now, you'll be
more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by
the ones you did. So throw off the bow line,
sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds
in your sales, explore, dream discover from the famous Mark Twain.

(11:43):
And I've kind of tried to live by that philosophy
of my wife, and it sounds to me like Elon
Musks as well, and I have before we part company.
That fascinating conversation and just a fascinating man he is.
And I appreciate you writing this book as a you know,
sort of a guideline for folks in business, most notably,
but going back to Starlink and how massive the growth is.
And I think that desire to build this independent satellite

(12:07):
network also springs from his embracing freedom and liberty. You know,
Verizon or the government might flip the switch and shut
your cell phone off. But there's Elon Musk with a backup,
sure enough.

Speaker 3 (12:19):
And you know, I think he sees a synergy.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Among these businesses that the rest of us don't see,
you know, the Startlink satellite network. Brian guides the Tesla
cars right, and then his EXAI engine ends up ingesting
all of the data from Tesla cars. It's able to
ingest the six thousand tweets put up every second on
the X platform and get smarter and smarter and smarter.

(12:44):
He's got the Olympus robot inside Tesla where one day
you might be able to take an arm from the
Olympus robot, attach it to an antitee and with the
brain chip company's got neuralink, you know, the antute could
operate the arm just by thinking about it. And you
know we think that oh he wants to chip for QUADRUPLEG. No, No,
he thinks in twenty years, thirty years, millions of us

(13:07):
well walking around with these chips in our heads to
talk faster to AI. So it all fits together, and
it's just an incredible vision that really he has no
right to have it all.

Speaker 3 (13:16):
It's just absolutely crazy.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
And yet if you were playing a video game, you'd say, well,
what the heck, why not?

Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yeah, all that frightens the hell out of me. Though,
I got to be honest with you, Dennis, I.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
Like be sad if it were a game, you know,
I feel like this is life, this is real.

Speaker 3 (13:31):
Tomorrow we'll right here, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
I couldn't agree more on that component, but just the
idea that all that data is being gathered up, and
I'm a privacy fan. I hate the hoovering up of data.
That's why I recommend my listeners data hell away from
TikTok because that just benefits the Chinese Communist Party and
they're hoovering up of data. But at least knowing who
Elon Musk is and this doesn't offer me is much comfort.
But he seems to be wanting that data to advance

(13:57):
and help us, as opposed to use against us, which
is the antithesis of what tiktoks huge difference. And now
he's being demonized like crazy by the media, by the Democrats,
by Rhino Republicans, and suddenly he's publican Enemy number one,
even more so than Trump, and they're just trying to
take him down. What are they so afraid of why
don't we all step back and just take a gander

(14:20):
and watch what this guy does. I mean, you know,
if it is a simulation, you don't make a simulation
for boring outcomes, right.

Speaker 3 (14:26):
Elon has another lesson Lesson eleven.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
My book is is you know, the most the most
likely outcome in life is the most entertaining, one of
the most ironic and opposite of what you expected.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
And look how entertaining life is. Ventilately, Oh my goodness,
this it has.

Speaker 1 (14:40):
We live in interesting times and he makes them far
more interesting. And he's the best troll on the Internet
when it comes to cowing out his foes at Dennis
Neil a real pleasure having on the Morning Share. Thank
you for spending time by listeners to me this morning.
Your book is now available on my blog page fifty
five krsey dot com the leadership genius of Elon Musk.
If you're a business person, get a copy, but everyone's

(15:01):
welcome to read it and learn by it. Thank you
for putting it on pay for Dennis, It's been a
real pleasure.