How Elon Musk Spends His Time

How do you spend your days now? Like what do you? My time is mostly split between SpaceX and Tesla. And of course, I try to spend a part of every week at OpenAI. So I spend most—I spend basically half a day at OpenAI most weeks. And then I have some OpenAI stuff that happens during the week. But other than that, it's really Tesla.

Like, what does your time look like there?

Yeah, so that's a good question. I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on business-y things, but actually, almost all my time—eighty percent of it—is spent on engineering, design, engineering and design. So it's developing the next generation product. That's 80% of it.

You probably know—I remember this a very long time ago, many, many years—you took me on a tour of SpaceX, and the most impressive thing was that you knew every detail of the rocket and every piece of engineering that went into it. I don't think many people get that about you.

Yeah, I think a lot of people think I'm kind of a business person or something. That's just fine; like, business is fine. But like, I really—it's… you know, it was like at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell was chief operating officer. She kind of manages legal, finance, sales, and kind of general business activity. And then my time is almost entirely with the engineering team working on improving the Falcon 9 and the Dragon spacecraft and developing the most colonial architecture.

I mean, at Tesla, it's working on the Model 3. And yes, I'm in the design studio, took very up half a day a week dealing with the aesthetics and look-and-feel things. And then most weeks is just going through engineering of the car itself as well as engineering of the factory.