Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen believes Elon Musk is impossible to compete with. The billionaire co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz has worked closely with the Tesla chief and has identified and interviewed candidates for the Department for Government Efficiency (Doge). Andreessen has also invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Musk's start-ups including xAI and SpaceX, while also backing his $44 billion takeover of X.
In a 2023 video, which is viral now, Andreessen listed reasons why Musk is an unconventional CEO who cannot be outperformed.
"I’m not aware of another CEO who operates the way he does," Andreessen said on a podcast with Chris Williamson. The co-founder of early web browser Netscape believes one has to go back in history to the industrialists of the late 1800s and early 1900s, such as Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, and Thomas Watson, to find founders comparable to Musk.
“Those guys ran very similar to the way Elon runs things… The top line thing is just this incredible devotion from the leader of the company to fully, deeply understand what the company does, to be completely knowledgeable about every aspect of it, and to be in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work to deeply understand the issues. And then be the lead problem solver in the organisation," Andreessen said. "Basically what Elon does is he shows up every week at each of his companies, identifies the biggest problem the company’s having that week and he fixes it. He does that every week for 52 weeks in a row and then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year.”
Andreessen also highlighted that another important factor in Musk's success was his ability to attract incredible talent.
“Many of the best people in the world want to work with him because if you work with Elon the expectations are through the roof in terms of your level of performance. And he is going to know who you are and what you’ve done. He’s going to know what you’ve done this week and if you’re underperforming. And he may fire you in the meeting if you’re not carrying your weight," he said. "But if you are as committed to the company as he is, and hard working and capable, many people who have worked for him say that they had the best experience of their lives.”
Andreessen also recalled what somebody who joined SpaceX from another aerospace company had said, “It’s like being dropped into a shocking zone of competence. Everybody around me is so absolutely competent.”
The billionaire also pointed out that Musk's technical ability gives him a major edge over other non-technical CEOs:
“When he identifies the bottleneck, he goes and talks to the line engineers who understand the technical nature of the bottleneck… He’s not asking the VP of Engineering to ask the Director of Engineering to ask the manager to ask the individual contributor to write a report that’s to be reviewed in three weeks. He doesn’t do that. What he does is he goes and personally finds the engineer who actually has the knowledge about the thing, and then he sits in the room with that engineer and fixes the problem with them," he said. "And again, this is why he inspires such incredible loyalty from especially the technical people who he works with."
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