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Elon Musk has his hands in so many cookie jars these days it’s hard for me to keep track of what he’s even doing right now. I could be wrong, but I think he’s trying to put self-driving cars powered by solar panels on Mars and build a hyperloop from SoCal to Vegas to make travel for bachelor parties easier. At least I’m pretty sure that’s where Elon’s focus is right now.
I don’t really have strong feelings about Elon Musk the Visionary, or Elon Musk the billionaire playboy and CEO. I just see him as another name in the news, and someone with so much fucking money that he’s pretty much lost complete and total touch with the reality that you and I live in. But, this story I just came across over on Business Insider actually has me liking him.
RARELY is there ever a meeting in which all parties are integral to the meeting. This is a major problem with meetings and one that Elon Musk recognizes:
The SpaceX employee relayed a story where Musk once called out an employee in a meeting. The employee wrote:
“One of my close friends started there a couple years before me. He worked (and still does) in an analysis group, so meetings made less sense when you could just walk over and ask someone a question. He told me a story one time (this is paraphrased):
“Elon to a meeting member: ‘You haven’t said anything. Why are you in here?'”“That may be borderline rude, but it makes sense,” he wrote. “Don’t be in a meeting unless there’s a purpose for it; either to make a decision, or get people up to speed. In most cases, an email will suffice.” (via)
I fucking hate meetings because 99% of meetings are a waste of time. More often than not, meetings are a way for people who don’t do any actual work during the day to eat up hours in the work day. Meetings make it look like they’re actually staying busy/working when in reality they’re just sitting there and gobbling up the work of others to then regurgitate that work to another set of worker bees in a meeting later that day. It’s kind of nice to know that Elon Musk feels as strongly about wasteful meetings as I do.
Elon Musk’s strong feelings on meetings aren’t too far off from Jeff Bezos’ feelings on meetings. Bezos employs the interesting ‘two pizza rule’ to cut down on shitty bloated meetings, and to learn more about that you can click here.