I Don’t Need These Russians 126
join and was competent. Those who were willing to join
couldn’t do the job and those who could do the job weren’t
willing to join. “A lot of aerospace senior managers seem
to be really disassociated from and unable to do hard core
engineering,” Elon said. “I think that is a mistake and results
in cloudy judgment on important technical issues – they
can’t tell if something is really good or not, so they just do
what everyone else does, assuming it to be the safe bet.”^285
It would be has hard to find a good CEO if Elon needed
to replace himself. “Jeff Bezos could do this [be CEO of
SpaceX]. Larry Page could do this. Bill Gates could do
this. But there’s just a really small list of people with the
sufficient technical and business ability to do this job,” Elon
said.^71
The original SpaceX team consisted of about 20 SpaceX-
ers, as they call themselves. It was a small, but efficient
team. “I think it is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people
to get a complicated job done,” Elon said. “Numbers will
never compensate for talent in getting the right answer
[Two people who don’t know something are no better than
one], will tend to slow down progress and will make the
task incredibly expensive.”^285
To find a great team, Elon didn’t cold-call different
experts. Because almost all other private rocket companies
had failed, the experts didn’t want to join yet another
company that eventually would fail.^365 “It would have
been quite difficult if I’d just started off by cold-calling
them and saying that I wanted to start a rocket company,”
Elon said. “What I said was ‘Would you mind helping