Almost a decade ago, I invited Elon to speak at a conference I was helping to organise at Oxford. Would've been very on-topic for him, but he declined with a pi

Almost a decade ago, I invited Elon to speak at a conference I was helping to organise at Oxford. Would've been very on-topic for him, but he declined with a pithy one-line reply. Was a solid enough opportunity that it was probably worth wasting a minute of his time. Had I come to him with something more trivial, I suspect the response would have been pithier and less polite. The impression I've gotten is that Elon likes to work with smart people, and that part of being smart is being able to make good calls about when to escalate something and to whom. Escalating an issue too high (or too low) is probably not a mistake one gets to make very often. It would be impossible to impose a discipline like this on a bunch of worker-drones. But amongst reasonably intelligent people, with honest leadership at the top levels, it seems achievable.