Idea Overload 332
with ideas.”^354
To nurture creativity in their company, Google came up
with the “20 percent time,” where employees can work with
what they want for one day each week. “I think Google has
been pretty good at this by allowing people to take Friday
every week to work on some crazy project,” Elon said. “I
think that’s a good idea, I think we will probably implement
something like that at SpaceX and Tesla. Lots of employees
have great ideas, and if they can simply get the resources
to implement them.”^360
Like when Elon believed in a small government, he’s
neither a fan of big companies, partly because of his own
experience from an internship. “They didn’t have just one
coffeemaker there, they had a special coffeemaker for the
executives. An executive coffeemaker,” he said.^263
While Steve Jobs wanted his Macintosh-group to act
like pirates, Elon want his companies to act like the special
forces. SpaceX is like Top Gun and Tesla Motors is like
Delta Force. “We do the missions that others think are
impossible,” Elon said. “We have goals that are absurdly
ambitious by any reasonable standard, but we’re going to
make them happen.”^24 In comparison, NASA is like a navy
and General Motors is like an army. “It’s better to be a
pirate than to join the navy,” Jobs said.^3
General Motors argued that as Tesla grows, it would be
difficult to act like small organizations. You can’t organize
an entire army in the same way as you organize Navy Seals.
“Inevitably, Tesla will discover that the only way to succeed
on the scale we have is to be exactly like us,” they said. “The