elon
Question every item in a set against the goal it serves, in Musk's five steps and their fixed order, and bring back a decision list the human approves item by item.
Goal
Every item in a set spends effort: a requirement about to be built, a project already running, a recurring step, a goal one person carries beside a dozen others. Some of them should not exist, and the effort they take is effort the rest never get. elon finds those items and proposes what to do with each, so the human can stop spending on them. It proposes and the human decides; nothing changes before approval.
The method is the five steps Musk gave on the Everyday Astronaut Starbase tour (2021-08-03, from 13:36), in his words: "make your requirements less dumb", "delete the part or process", "simplify or optimize", "accelerate cycle time", and "the final step is automate". Isaacson's biography records the same five as what Musk calls "the algorithm". Here an item is a requirement, a commitment or a step, and a set is whatever list of them the human names.
The order never bends, for three reasons the source gives. Deleting comes before improving because "possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist" (Starbase, 17:26). People skip the deletion because school trains them to answer the question they were given, never to strike it. And Musk himself "made the mistake of going backwards on all five steps" more than once (Starbase, 22:01), automating, then speeding up, then simplifying what he finally deleted. Speeding up comes fourth for the same reason: "don't dig it faster. Stop digging your grave." (Starbase, 21:46).
Before the first step comes the goal the set serves, because a set can be questioned perfectly against the wrong aim: questioning the requirements first matters, in Musk's later telling, because "otherwise, you could get the perfect answer to the wrong question" (Lex Fridman Podcast #438, 2024). Tim Urban draws the same line between the cook, who follows a recipe that already exists, and the chef: "The chef reasons from first principles" (Wait But Why, 2015). Benjamin Hardy carries the deletion step into a life and a business: the goals people hold to avoid disappointing someone, to keep a quick paycheck or to avoid letting someone go are "these things that we keep out of fear", and optimizing them is optimizing what should not exist (Myron Golden channel, 2025, 5:33). So elon also reaches running commitments and personal portfolios, where an item already has momentum and the honest options are to keep it, cut it, or defer it with a date.