Could Nikola Tesla Get an Interview?

Musk made the remark at the U.S. Air Force Space Pitch Day (San Francisco, November 5, 2019), answering how he finds and attracts talent. His rule was that the recruiting process has to let strong people in the door: anyone good who wants to join should “actually get an interview.” Nikola Tesla is the example with a point on it, because Tesla, the car company, is named after him, so the firm carrying his name is the one that might screen him out. (The talk was recorded; the wording here is the form reproduced consistently across transcriptions of the video, which was not directly retrievable.)

If one of the most brilliant engineers who ever lived can’t clear the résumé stage, the broken thing is the screen, not the candidate. Musk doesn’t say what about Tesla would trip the filter, so the famous line is a diagnosis with no cure attached.

In a 2014 interview, Musk gave the fix the 2019 line withholds: stop hiring on credentials. What he looks for, he said, is “evidence of exceptional ability”, the test being whether someone faced hard problems and overcame them, with no college degree required. That is the screen the rhetorical question argues for, one that measures what a person has actually built, so the next Tesla isn’t turned away for lacking the usual paperwork.