Tesla class

(cont'd)

CEO Elon Musk "just wants to focus on making the world’s best car, and the $70,000 Model S, by all rights, can claim that prize." They burned through $1.5 billion in the last twelve months, but investors seem to have confidence that Tesla can become everything their CEO wants to accomplish so the funding keeps coming in.

What does he look for when he hires?  “Elon doesn’t settle for good or very good. He wants the best. So he asks job candidates what kinds of complex problems they’ve solved before and he wants details.”

“We always probe deeply into achievement on the résumé,” says Musk. “Success has many parents, so we look to find out who really did it. I don’t care if they graduated from university or even high school.”

When a new CIO was hired, his first task was to build all the software to run the company - from scratch - in three months - at 1/5 the cost. "When Vijayan told him such a task wasn’t possible, Musk simply stated, with a Steve Jobs-like confidence: “Let me know what you need from my side to make this happen.” Says Vijayan, “He doesn’t accept constraints as ‘givens’ the way most people do.”

According to their "vice president of engineering: “We take leaps of faith that are like jumping out of an airplane and designing and building the parachute on the way down.”