Interestingly, if you read the new Musk biography from Isaacson, Musk’s approach of committing to an overaggressive deadline, rallying all his workers to stay up until 3am on the shop floor and generally yelling at them like a military commander actually worked remarkably well again and again at Tesla and SpaceX. They accomplished business goals that no one thought was possible, continually pulling rabbits out of a hat.
However, the evidence suggests that this approach does not work for a research problem like developing self-driving cars. It seems that you can’t just yell at software engineers and make them stay awake all night until they make an AI research breakthrough. The difference with SpaceX/Tesla was that the hurdles were fundamentally manufacturing and efficiency problems (after all, we made it to the moon in 1969 - and in both cases Musk had a basically working prototype very early on), not problems of science research.
However, the evidence suggests that this approach does not work for a research problem like developing self-driving cars. It seems that you can’t just yell at software engineers and make them stay awake all night until they make an AI research breakthrough. The difference with SpaceX/Tesla was that the hurdles were fundamentally manufacturing and efficiency problems (after all, we made it to the moon in 1969 - and in both cases Musk had a basically working prototype very early on), not problems of science research.