This as-told-to narrative emerges from an extensive conversation with Spencer Penn, a 33-year-old entrepreneur and the visionary founder of LightSource, who currently makes his home in San Francisco. The account has been carefully refined for precision and readability while preserving the authenticity of his reflections.\n\nA decade ago, Penn relocated to California—a move driven by curiosity and ambition—at a time when Tesla was still viewed as a relatively small, almost boutique automotive company operating on the fringes of the mainstream car market. Production volumes were modest in comparison to the company’s later scale, hovering around a thousand vehicles per week. This was an era when electric vehicles remained more a daring experiment than a commercial inevitability.\n\nFriends and family, observing from the outside, largely viewed his decision to work at Tesla as a professional gamble, even bordering on recklessness. Many regarded the company’s products as novelties: sophisticated yet impractical creations that might dazzle technology enthusiasts but would hardly replace a conventional automobile. They jokingly described the vehicle as little more than a high-powered tablet—an ‘iPad on wheels.’ Yet, for Penn, the allure lay not in the skepticism but in the opportunity to witness the unfolding ambition of Elon Musk firsthand—a figure who, even then, was reshaping notions of what technology and manufacturing could achieve.\n\nPenn emphasizes that his personal interactions with Musk were consistently positive; however, he distances himself from being an uncritical admirer. Rather than reverence, he conveys an appreciation for what he calls Musk’s strikingly distinctive leadership style. Tesla, he explains, operated according to a remarkably flat organizational model. Despite his youth and relative inexperience, Penn found that only two hierarchical levels separated him from Musk himself—a proximity to executive decision-making almost unheard of for someone so early in his career.\n\nNevertheless, he notes that a flat structure should not be mistaken for an egalitarian distribution of authority. In practice, Musk’s influence was absolute. Within that streamlined hierarchy, Elon remained, as Penn puts it, ‘the king’; his directives carried final weight. Progress on major initiatives could be achieved only with Musk’s approval, and organizational momentum often hinged upon his limited bandwidth. Around 2017, Musk was simultaneously managing Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink, while also beginning his involvement with OpenAI. With only two and a half days each week fully devoted to Tesla, employees learned to operate within those compressed windows to secure decisions or feedback.\n\nWhat distinguished Musk, Penn observes, was his relentless focus on the product itself. His involvement extended far beyond strategic oversight—he concerned himself with tactile details, such as the texture of a paint finish or the sensory experience of interacting with a vehicle’s interior. Securing his endorsement for even seemingly minor changes was crucial because his emphasis on product excellence permeated every corner of the organization. In contrast to leaders who gradually distance themselves from the day-to-day creative process, Musk maintained a conviction that the product’s innovation and quality were the company’s true north, the engine that powered Tesla’s growth and endurance.\n\nPenn has endeavored to bring that same spirit into his own company. He continues to actively demonstrate products, believing that leadership should remain tangibly connected to what the team builds. In his words, when leaders remove their hands from the wheel, the organization can unintentionally drift off course. Staying engaged helps preserve vision and direction.\n\nReflecting further, he characterizes Musk as someone who routinely sets extremely ambitious objectives—targets that can both inspire and endanger. The upside lies in the potential to achieve extraordinary outcomes through audacity, but the downside is possible reputational risk when lofty promises remain unfulfilled. As evidence, he recalls the unveiling of the new Roadster, a dazzling preview of what was to come, which, years later, had still not reached production. Yet this same boldness produced triumphs few anticipated, most notably the rapid success of Starlink. In Penn’s view, when you apply intense pressure, weaknesses and inefficiencies reveal themselves; this, he believes, is the functional value of nearly impossible goals.\n\nMusk’s appetite for risk, Penn says, is nearly unmatched. He has repeatedly wagered Tesla’s survival on future prospects, metaphorically ‘putting the chips back on red.’ This mindset—leaning into peril rather than retreating from it—has profoundly shaped how Penn thinks about leadership. Professional managers, he notes, often gravitate toward caution, which can slowly erode an organization’s competitive edge. There is a real danger, he warns, of slipping into a stable yet stagnant mode of operation that quietly leads to decline.\n\nWithin Tesla’s culture, symbolic gestures carried significant meaning. For instance, when word spread that Musk was personally working onsite in the factory until specific issues were resolved, it galvanized the workforce. Such dedication signaled that no one, not even the CEO, was exempt from the grind. Penn recalls the hotel situated just across from Tesla’s Fremont facility and admits he sometimes wished Musk would allow himself the comfort of a proper night’s rest there. Yet, as he concedes, the symbolism of sleeping in the factory—of enduring alongside the team—was immensely powerful.\n\nPenn attempts to channel a version of that ethos within LightSource. He maintains a daily presence in the office, arriving early and staying late, demonstrating through example that leadership includes rolling up one’s sleeves. He participates in humble, tangible tasks—unloading the office dishwasher, assembling furniture—acts that reinforce solidarity and set a tone of shared accountability.\n\nWhen Penn later joined Waymo, he encountered an organizational framework that contrasted sharply with Tesla’s. Waymo, as part of the Google family, exhibited a far more vertical hierarchy, structured by multiple layers of management, much like its parent company. Yet within that vertical structure existed a more fluid, lateral distribution of influence—a cultural dynamic that Penn describes as ‘rotated ninety degrees’ from Tesla’s rigid chain of command.\n\nHe vividly remembers colleagues comparing Waymo’s internal operations to the behavior of slime mold—a fascinating metaphor implying a network that organically expands into new territories and forms connections independently. This analogy captured the company’s philosophy of decentralized idea generation, where individual contributors were empowered to pursue creative solutions autonomously. That environment, though prone to a few inefficiencies such as duplicated efforts across teams, was fertile ground for innovation.\n\nAt Tesla, strategic direction originated primarily from Musk and his close circle of trusted lieutenants. Junior members contributed incrementally but rarely influenced high-level decisions. In contrast, at Google and Waymo, Penn found that groundbreaking ideas often came from individual team members whose intellectual freedom was actively encouraged.\n\nThis experience taught Penn an essential lesson that he now applies in his startup: while early-stage ventures must remain sharply focused due to limited resources, the cultivation of creativity demands room for experimentation. One particularly illustrative anecdote stands out. A newly hired engineer requested to postpone his start date by a month so he could immerse himself in the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence before officially joining. That period of self-guided study proved invaluable; upon arrival, the engineer brought with him an array of original concepts, several of which matured into integral product features. For Penn, this reaffirmed that innovation thrives when individuals are entrusted with the autonomy to explore and learn deeply.\n\nLeadership, he concludes, involves not only guiding the company’s direction but also consciously delegating the pursuit of innovation to those closest to the problems. That willingness to empower others—a principle he absorbed from observing Google’s culture—has become one of the defining aspects of how he now leads LightSource.
Sourse: https://www.businessinsider.com/former-tesla-waymo-employee-leadership-lessons-from-elon-musk-2025-12
