One day, millions of people will look up at the Martian sky and call Mars home
Starship is going to take us there
And the roads, cities, factories and entire civilization built there all trace back to this machine
Starship is how humanity becomes multiplanetary
Elon Musk was asked how he handles employees who disagree with him publicly.
His answer contradicts every leadership book written in the last 30 years.
"I'd rather have someone who argues with me and is right than someone who agrees with me and is wrong."
The room expected the diplomatic answer. That he values diverse perspectives. That healthy debate makes the team stronger. The standard CEO answer about psychological safety.
He went further. He said the most dangerous person in any company is the one who agrees with you to protect their job. Because that person will let you drive the company off a cliff rather than risk being fired for telling you the cliff is there. The yes-man isn't loyal. He's selfish. He's trading the company's survival for his own comfort.
He said SpaceX has a rule. If an engineer sees a problem and doesn't speak up, and the problem later causes a failure, the silence is treated as more serious than the mistake itself. The person who made the error was trying. The person who watched the error and said nothing was protecting themselves at the cost of the mission.
Think about what that inverts. In most companies, the person who stays quiet and avoids conflict is rewarded with job security. At SpaceX, silence is the fireable offense and disagreement is the job requirement.
Most leaders say they want honesty. Then they punish the first person who delivers it. He built a system where dishonesty through silence is the thing that gets punished. The culture didn't happen by accident. It was engineered to make agreement more dangerous than disagreement.