The Six-Rule Email

In April 2018, Musk circulated a productivity memo to Tesla employees that was widely reported by business media. It distilled his operating philosophy on communication into six rules:

1. No large meetings unless everyone benefits. Large meetings waste the time of everyone who isn’t directly needed. If only three people need to decide, three people attend.
2. No frequent meetings unless urgent. Once a crisis is resolved, immediately reduce meeting frequency.
3. Leave meetings you add nothing to. “It is not rude to leave a meeting. It is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.”
4. Drop jargon and acronyms. Specialized language creates communication barriers and lets people hide unclear thinking behind unfamiliar terms. Any new acronym must be approved.
5. Communicate by the shortest path, not the chain of command. Anyone can and should communicate directly with whoever they need to. Going through managers for information transmission is slow and degrades signal.
6. Follow logic and good judgment, not rules. If following a rule doesn’t make sense in context, the rule should be questioned, not followed by default.

The underlying principle. Each rule attacks a different form of institutional drag: unnecessary meetings waste time, jargon obscures thinking, hierarchical communication degrades information, and rule-following without judgment produces bureaucratic output rather than results.

The memo was written during Tesla’s Model 3 production crisis, when the company had the least time to waste. That context matters: these rules aren’t aspirational culture statements. They were operational corrections to specific failure modes Musk observed inside a company under pressure.