“Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.”
Automate Last
Step 5 of Musk’s five-step procedure for engineering and operations, spoken in the Everyday Astronaut Starbase tour with Tim Dodd, July 30, 2021. Walter Isaacson documents the procedure (which Musk himself calls “the algorithm”) in Elon Musk (Simon & Schuster, 2023), grounding it in the 2017-2018 Model 3 ramp at Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory and the Fremont assembly plant, when Musk’s first move was to robotize the line and watch it stall. His April 13, 2018 tweet was the public reckoning: “Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.”
If step 1 (question every requirement) lands, the requirement may not survive, and there is nothing to automate. If step 2 (delete the part or process) lands, the part is gone. Steps 3 and 4 reshape what is left and how fast it is built; the human pass may already be fast enough. Automating first locks capex into a process the earlier four steps might have changed or removed.