Elon Musk’s 15 Daily Prompts That Rewired How I Think About Hard Problems

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Nov 30, 2025 05:41 AM

🎯

When approaching a problem, ask yourself:

Fundamentals

Assumptions

10X faster

10X cheaper

10X scale

Total failure

Fresh perspective

Biggest Leverage

Every ambitious builder eventually hits that same wall: Why do my solutions feel incremental while the real breakthroughs feel like magic?

Then I stumbled into a thread distilling 15 prompts Elon Musk uses daily—and it completely reshaped the way I attack complex problems. These aren’t motivational quotes. They’re cognitive tools. They force you out of lazy assumptions and into first-principles thinking, the same mental engine behind SpaceX, Tesla, and Starlink. 🚀

I’ve since adopted them in my own work across AI research, recsys, LLMs, and startup building. They cut through noise and make you confront the physics of the problem—not the politics, not the industry dogma, not the “way things have always been done.”

Here’s my digest of those 15 prompts, written from my experience using them day-to-day.

1. ⚙️ What are the physics of this problem?

Forget opinions. Strip everything down to constraints, capabilities, and bottlenecks.

When I do this, the real blockers surface immediately—and they’re rarely the ones I assumed.

2. 🧨 What assumptions am I blindly inheriting?

This is where most breakthroughs hide.

Ask yourself, “What if none of these rules were real?”

It’s shocking how often the answer is: they aren’t.

3. 🧱 Break it into fundamental components

Decompose until every piece is legible.

Inputs → processes → outputs → failure points.

This turns vague goals into solvable engineering tasks.

4. 🛸 What is the perfect, cost-free solution?

Unlimited money, infinite GPUs, zero deadlines.

Design the ideal.

Only then work backward to reality.

5. 🔪 If I had to cut 90% of the scope, what must survive?

This is brutal—and freeing.

It reveals the true core of the project, the part everything else depends on.

6. 💣 Assume this totally fails—why?

A pre-mortem that forces honesty.

You’ll see failure modes you were emotionally avoiding.

7. 🚫 Ignore the industry. What solution emerges?

Every mature field calcifies.

When you explicitly ignore existing playbooks, contrarian ideas suddenly feel obvious.

8. 🧲 What’s actually impossible vs. what only feels impossible?

Most “impossibilities” are social, emotional, or political—not physical.

9. ⚡ What’s the Minimum Viable Breakthrough (MVB)?

Not MVP.

What’s the smallest change that gives a step-function improvement?

This is how you leapfrog competitors.

10. 🧽 If I started fresh today, knowing what I know now, what would I build?

This kills sunk-cost bias.

You see the clean-sheet version that you should have built in the first place.

11. 🔓 Which constraints are fake?

Some constraints feel permanent—until you question them.

Budgets, team structures, formats, policies… so much is negotiable.

12. 🧊 If I only cared about what works—not politics—what would I do?

This is brutally clarifying.

A lot of “difficult decisions” become obvious when you strip out social cost.

13. 🏎️ If I had to do this 10× faster, what changes?

Speed forces clarity.

You’ll find automation candidates, parallel steps, and pointless delays.

14. 📈 How would this scale to millions?

Thinking in orders of magnitude exposes architecture flaws early.

This is where I catch design mistakes that would cost months later.

15. 🎯 What’s the highest-leverage point in the entire system?

Not all components are equal.

One subsystem, if dramatically improved, gives outsized gains.

Find it. Focus there.

🔥 Why these prompts matter

Most people iterate. They polish. They optimize around the edges.

These prompts don’t let you do that.

They rip you out of the default mode and force perspective shifts that reveal completely different strategies.

When I apply these prompts to my own AI and product work—recsys metrics, retrieval architecture, LLM alignment, startup strategy—the solutions always become bigger, cleaner, and shockingly simpler.

Breakthroughs aren’t random.

They’re engineered by asking better questions.

And these 15 prompts? They’re the sharpest tools I’ve found. 💡🔥

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