Elon Musk: Don't make analogies, think from first principles!

Elon Musk pointed out in an interview that most people tend to think by relying on “analogies,” meaning they copy what others do—if someone else does it, they do it too.

But Musk then introduced his own way of thinking, called “First Principles,” which involves breaking down a problem to its most fundamental parts, starting from the essence of the matter, and then gradually building up understanding step by step.

He used the example of “electric vehicle batteries”: for instance, everyone says that batteries are expensive “as a matter of course” because they’ve always been costly.

However, if you approach it from the “First Principles,” you should ask: what exactly are batteries made of? What are the real market prices of these materials (cobalt, nickel, aluminum, etc.)? You will find that the raw material costs are far lower than imagined—it’s just that no one has done the calculations or reconstructed the pathway.

True innovation shouldn’t be about “rephrasing” existing knowledge, but about starting from the bottom, thereby overturning old perceptions.