For many employees, leaving a meeting before it ends can feel awkward. Even when the discussion has little to do with their work, people often stay until the meeting is officially over because walking out may appear disrespectful. Elon Musk once described a very different approach. During a conversation at the 2015 Edison Electric Institute (EEI) Annual Convention in New Orleans, Musk spoke with Edison International Chairman, Ted Craver about Tesla, electric vehicles and the changing energy industry. Musk discussed Tesla’s approach to meetings and said that employees who had nothing to contribute could leave.“We also have a rule that if somebody’s in a meeting and finds that this meeting is not helping them in a meaningful way and they are not contributing to the meeting, they should just leave,” Musk said. He then gave a very direct instruction: “Just get up and pack. Just get up and walk out, all right.” Craver asked whether doing that would be considered rude in Tesla’s workplace culture. “And would that be, in your culture, would it be rude to do that?” “No, that’s expected,” said Musk. Then he added: “It’s rude to stay.” During the same conversation, Musk explained the reasoning further. If someone was simply looking at their phone or laptop during a meeting, he said, they could do that at their desk instead. He also described meetings as “a big time suck.”
Musk later put the same idea in a Tesla memo
Musk wrote. “Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.”
Musk returned to the subject three years later in an email to Tesla employees. The April 2018 message came as Tesla was working to increase Model 3 production, and Musk included a section of recommendations on productivity. The email resurfaced after an X user shared it in an X post to which Musk replied in an affirmative yes. His first recommendation concerned large meetings. “Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time,” Musk wrote. He advised employees to get rid of large meetings unless they were certain that the meetings were providing value to everyone attending. If such a meeting was necessary, he said it should be kept very short. He also addressed meetings that happen repeatedly. “Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter,” Musk wrote. “Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.”
His advice went beyond meetings
The email resurfaced after an X user shared it in an X post to which Musk replied in an affirmative yes.
The 2018 email also addressed how Tesla employees communicated with one another. Musk told employees that communication should take the shortest route necessary to get a job done rather than automatically moving through a management hierarchy. “Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the ‘chain of command,’” he wrote. He also warned against using internal acronyms and terminology that required employees to learn additional vocabulary simply to understand their colleagues. “Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software, or processes at Tesla,” Musk wrote. “In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication.” He explained the reason in practical terms, “We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla.”
