Musk went silent. McNeill, unaware that Musk engaged in prolonged pauses and unsure whether his future boss was even still on the line, thought Musk was “mega pissed”.

Suddenly, Musk chimed in. “You’re going to fit in here just fine,” he said.

Musk has a well-earned reputation as a tough person to work for, an unpredictable character prone to “rage firings”. His companies have a reputation for executive turnover, as employees manoeuvre intense and fluctuating timelines and burnout. To many, it’s worth it: working for a Musk company, some say, is a once-in-a-lifetime experience to deliver on lofty goals that would be unachievable elsewhere in the tech industry.

Those who hang on long enough for their stock to vest can also be rewarded with generational wealth. Tesla is worth more than a trillion dollars and SpaceX, Musk’s rocket company, is expected to publicly debut later this year at a more than US$1 trillion ($1.7t) valuation.

But to thrive requires surviving drastic cuts – Musk’s companies operate with extremely lean workforces – along with abrupt shifts to goals and missions.

It can also require a deep understanding of your employer. In his three years working at Tesla, directly reporting to Musk, McNeill learned to live by his boss’s ultimate motivation, freeing up his own time, which became a North Star.

“When I asked [Musk] what success looked like … he said, ‘Success is getting me down to one day a week at Tesla so I can get back to my first love, which is rockets,’” McNeill said.

In coming years, other companies could adopt similarly hard-charging methods, seeking to replicate Musk’s success.

If “you’re trying to solve something that’s never been solved before, there’s tremendous technological or intellectual gaps in our knowledge that maybe having a less formal culture and allowing people to go off on tangents … [is] exactly the right thing to do,” said David Larcker, professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

But every company is different, he added. “If you go into a regular organisation – ‘Don’t respect the hierarchy’ … can that really work?”

Musk and Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

With Musk, McNeill understood that conventional ways of thinking could land someone in hot water, while risk-taking often was rewarded. But that left executives navigating a precarious balance.

Often the decisions that could lead to the biggest successes were the ones that carried a large potential downside. McNeill adopted a strategy of allowing such risks, provided they were reversible – a “two-way door,” as he put it.

He had to allow that flexibility, McNeill said, because at Tesla Musk prized speed, seeking a competitive advantage through quickness.

“Our edge will come competitively from making decisions faster than anybody else,” Musk would say, according to McNeill, who is co-founder of the venture studio DVx Ventures.

That forceful Silicon Valley-esque ethos played out under Steve Jobs and was codified by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who popularised the mantra “move fast and break things”.

Larcker, the Stanford professor, said that hard-driving mindset attracts a certain type of employee and is not necessarily scalable.

“I think he can be very harsh in his statements. Some people respond to that, and other people don’t,” Larcker said of Musk, also noting the potential for burnout. “People self-select into these things.”

Tesla’s workplace has also faced allegations of sexual harassment and racism, detailed in lawsuits and other complaints. Musk has said Tesla would “never seek victory in a just case against us, even if we will probably win” and “never surrender/settle an unjust case against us, even if we will probably lose”. The company settled separate racial discrimination lawsuits in 2024 and 2025, Reuters has reported.

Working with Musk requires a degree of compartmentalisation.

Musk has openly contradicted company executives at times, raising questions about job security in firms with high turnover.

In McNeill’s view, Musk companies operated with that style of critique. When mistakes compounded issues, however, that could force his boss’s hand.

“Elon would watch the quality of decisions that were made … and he would decide whether or not he could, in his words, trust your judgment,” he said. “If you were right more than you were wrong,” then you were safe.

“But if … your mistakes were causing harm, that’s when he moved super quickly,” McNeill said.

Musk’s style of management has not always succeeded, as evidenced by Musk’s US DOGE Service excursion. Initially billed as an effort to save trillions in government spending, it ended as an unpopular exercise that fell well short of its goal to make government more efficient.

McNeill, who had grown up in Kearney, Nebraska, and whose path to entrepreneurship included consulting work to optimise Great Plains meatpacking plants, would go on to become Tesla’s president.

In his new book, The Algorithm, the onetime Tesla and Lyft executive, who serves on the boards of Lululemon and General Motors, details a set of management principles that guided Musk, who would eventually turn Tesla into the world’s most valuable automaker. Among them: “Question every requirement” and “Delete every possible step in the process”.

Musk was drawn to McNeill, the entrepreneur said, because he was not a car executive. Tesla eventually became more valuable than Toyota, Volkswagen, Ford and General Motors combined.

Bureaucracy was practically non-existent. “Don’t respect hierarchy” was a theme, according to McNeill.

“What I’ve seen in big institutions is that they react to innovators like an external virus,” McNeill said. “And these big institutions are very effective at killing that virus and driving it out.” It happens in a pedestrian way, he said: through internal politics that treat those with ideas as toxic.

In contrast, when innovation thrived – even in large institutions – leaders had cleared the field for such advances to take place. Musk had a penchant for recognising those opportunities and clearing the field himself, even if it meant he was overbearing. “This weekly cadence of urgency … I describe it in the book at the secret ingredient. But it is really the core ingredient that makes the whole thing work,” McNeill said.

During those periods, Musk was a constant presence, holding frequent meetings, quizzing staff members, sometimes pushing up timelines.

Similarly, it was crucial for those seeking to advance to make sure they were working in the areas that were central to Musk’s focus.

“He decides what are the two or three existential issues in the business,” McNeill said. And he digs in on them, making them the subject of regular progress checks that could include probing, rapid-fire questions from a CEO who wasn’t afraid to get into the weeds.

For those focused on those two or three areas of the business, McNeill said, “that means you’re going to spend a lot of time with Elon”.

Those same workers shouldn’t be surprised, however, when one day, Musk’s interest has moved on. McNeill knows the feeling, saying it pains him to see Tesla moving on from some of its vehicles to pursue robots.

“I’ve got this sentimentality about how much blood, sweat and tears we poured into these things,” McNeill said. “He doesn’t.

“He’s got a really clinical look at cutting the past and moving to the future.”