We Are All in the Same Boat

In April 2018 Musk sent Tesla an internal email titled “Communication Within Tesla,” arguing that information should travel the shortest path that solves a problem rather than up and down the chain of command: anyone should be able to talk to anyone, including him, to get something done. This sentence is the email’s closing warning. It was first reported by Electrek and Jalopnik that week and authenticated by CNBC; the original is internal, so the wording rests on those reproductions rather than a public primary document.

Musk calls silo-building a “natural tendency” that has to be “actively fought,” and he aims the instruction at managers rather than the workers trying to cross the lines. The default pull of an organization is toward barriers, so keeping them down takes steady force rather than a one-time reorg.

Once a department’s wins are scored against its peers instead of against the whole company, holding back information becomes the smart move for that team and a cost to everyone else. That is what he means by success measured “relative within the company instead of collective,” and “We are all in the same boat” is the correction: the only scoreboard that counts is the company’s.