Elon Musk Slept on Tesla's Factory Floor So Workers Saw Him Suffering

At 4 in the morning, in the middle of a Tesla factory, Elon Musk, the company's chief executive, fell asleep on the floor. He woke up four hours later, where his team could see him.

It was not an accident. Musk had moved his life into the factories to fix the Model 3, the car Tesla had to build in volume or die trying. He stayed there for three years, hurrying between stations and bedding down where his crew could watch him.

Musk calls this leading from the front lines. As Musk explains it, when a crew is asked to push extremely hard, the leader must endure it beside them in full view. He said his workers would think, "If the CEO is willing to take that level of pain, I can do it, too." He summed up the idea with another of his lines: "Nobody bleeds for the prince in the palace."

The stakes were that blunt. Musk says Tesla botched nearly everything about building the Model 3. The mistakes were so many that fixing them required the whole company. He pulled staff off every other project and assigned them to the one car.

He told the team they had to go ultra hardcore and brace for harder work than they had ever known. He compared his own sense of priority to Indiana Jones sprinting down a temple hallway, with a boulder chasing him and a pit opening in front of him. Slow down and get crushed. Fail to leap and fall in.

So he tried to suffer most visibly. He bedded down on the concrete so his struggling crew would notice him there. He wanted them to understand he was not giving orders from a distant office, and that he felt at least as much discomfort as they did. He later said he worked at the edge of sanity.

He says he learned manufacturing well enough to know every part of the car. As Musk puts it: "I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth." He says he can explain how each component is built.