The only true currency is time.331
The best offense and defense is speed. The SR-71 Blackbird is a military plane with almost no defense except acceleration. It was never shot down. Not even once. Over three thousand missiles were shot at the SR-71 Blackbird and none hit. All it did was go faster. The power of speed is underappreciated as a competitive factor.332
The real way you actually achieve intellectual property (IP) protection is by innovating fast. If your rate of innovation is high, then you don’t need to worry about protecting the IP because other companies will be copying something you did years ago. That’s fine. Just make sure your rate of innovation is fast. Speed of innovation is what matters.333
We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do so with intelligence and agility.334 A factory moving at twice the speed of another factory is basically equivalent to two factories. The company will succeed if it can do with one factory what takes other companies two, three, or four factories. We try to think, “How can we make each factory produce what would normally require five or even ten factories?”335
I have a running triage of what I do at each company, constantly thinking, “What is the most useful thing I could do?”336
In early SpaceX, I told the team everything we did was a function of our burn rate. We were burning through a hundred thousand dollars per day. In the same way, I expected the revenue in ten years to be ten million dollars a day. Every day we were slower to achieve our goals was a day of missing out on that revenue.337
You need to be a vector, not just a scalar. That means you need to go at high speed in the right direction. No company will always be going in the right direction all the time—so you have to do course corrections, like a guided missile.338
I try to work as much as possible—to the edge of sanity. Every good hour or even minute of thinking about Tesla and SpaceX has such a big effect on the company. It makes sleeping difficult.
Tesla is getting to the point where every high-quality minute of thinking has a million-dollar impact. That is insane. If Tesla is doing $2 billion a week in revenue, that’s about $300 million a day, seven days a week. There are many instances where a half-hour meeting improved the company’s financial outcome by $100 million.339