Many things worth doing involve personal risk, sometimes even to life and limb. But companies like SpaceX, and many other successful ones, have mastered the di

Many things worth doing involve personal risk, sometimes even to life and limb. But companies like SpaceX, and many other successful ones, have mastered the distinction between necessary risks and unnecessary ones. And they do a lot to eliminate the latter. Risks from unknowable unknowns are acceptable, but those caused by negligence (especially outsized risks in this category) are not. You can move fast, break things, and still not be negligent. Consider big failures in business, finance and engineering – Enron, WeWork, collateralized debt obligations and the Challenger disaster perhaps. All had elements of reckless avoidable risks – known problems that were known to be outsized risks/exposures, that go against good known good practices. Known, known, known – that is negligence and dereliction of common sense. One does not move fast and break things for long before all the things are broken this way. But by not being negligent, I think you can go quite far, even into space. And the opposite of negligent is diligent – sweating the details. SpaceX really does sweat the details a lot. They will not have a power outage like this again. And that's what separates them from the examples of companies and endeavors I've given above. Enron, WeWork, CDOs, the Challenger – all had the same problems, week after week, month after month, quarter after quarter, even year after year that people knew about and chose to ignore.