Musk's first and most emphatic piece of advice was brutally direct. He backed it with the story of starting his first company with his brother: instead of getting an apartment, they rented a small office and slept on the couch. They showered at the YMCA. They had just one computer, so the website was up during the day and Musk was coding at night — seven days a week, all the time. 'I briefly had a girlfriend during that period,' he added, 'and in order to be with me she had to sleep in the office.' Then he laid out the simple math: 'If someone else is working 50 hours and you're working 100, you'll get twice as much done in the course of a year as the other company.' The advice was characteristically Musk — no nuance, no work-life balance caveats, just raw output as competitive advantage.