• Elon Musk fixes the biggest problems at his companies every week, Marc Andreessen says.
• Musk quickly tackles pressing issues by working directly with engineers and coders, the VC said.
• The Tesla and SpaceX CEO's method attracts great talent and inspires deep loyalty, Andreessen said.

Elon Musk has built some of the world's most valuable companies, from Tesla to SpaceX. A key driver of his success is a relentless focus on solving problems fast, often by working directly with the engineers or coders who've gotten stuck, Marc Andreessen says.

The legendary venture capitalist shared his insights from working closely with Musk on X, xAI, and SpaceX during a recent episode of the "Modern Wisdom" podcast.

Unlike many CEOs, Musk is devoted to understanding every aspect of his businesses, the Andreessen Horowitz cofounder and general partner said. He's "in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work," and acting as the "lead problem solver in the organization."

Musk's businesses include Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI, The Boring Company, and X — formerly Twitter. Andreessen said that every week at each of his companies, Musk "identifies the biggest problem that the company is having that week and he fixes it. And then he does that every week for 52 weeks in a row. And then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year, in that year."

In contrast, the bosses of most large corporations spend months or years holding meetings, watching presentations, and conducting legal and compliance reviews before they address their most pressing issues, Andreessen told host Chris Williamson.

Musk sees his businesses almost like assembly lines, and he focuses on removing bottlenecks and speeding up the conveyer belt a little more every week, the billionaire VC and Netscape cofounder said.

His laser focus on fixing problems attracts exceptionally talented people to his companies who want to work extremely hard and meet exacting standards, fueling further success for his businesses, Andreessen said.

Straight to the source

When Musk spots a bottleneck, he cuts through the layers of management to talk to the people actually working on the line or writing the code, Andreessen said.

"So he's not asking the VP of engineering to ask the director of engineering to ask the manager to ask the individual contributor to write a report that's to be reviewed in three weeks," the early-stage investor said. "He would throw them all out of the window."

Andreessen said Musk's approach of finding the person grappling with a particular issue, and then working with them to solve it, inspires deep loyalty.

The person thinks "if I'm up against a problem I don't know how to solve, freaking Elon Musk is going to show up in his Gulfstream, and he's going to sit with me overnight in front of the keyboard, or in front of the manufacturing line, and he's going to help me figure this out," the tech guru said.

Musk's strategy of tackling problem after problem has a "catalytic, multiplicative effect" that helps his businesses power ahead of rivals, Andreessen added.

In the past, Musk has been criticized for spreading himself too thin and not allocating enough time, energy, and resources to any one business like Tesla.

The world's wealthiest man has also said at points that he's working too hard and juggling too much, and his "hardcore" management style has been slammed as brutal and mercurial.

But in terms of technical progress and value generation, Musk's approach of getting involved quickly to fix things appears to be paying off.

• On a podcast, Marc Andreessen said he has spent half his time at Mar-a-Lago since Election Day.
• He said he regularly discusses tech and economic policy with President-elect Donald Trump.
• Andreessen donated millions to the pro-Trump super PAC "Right for America" and other GOP candidates.

Marc Andreessen said in a recent podcast appearance that since Election Day, he has spent roughly "half" his time at Mar-a-Lago discussing policy issues with President-elect Donald Trump.

Speaking with Bari Weiss for an episode of her "Honesty" podcast, the venture capitalist and vocal Trump supporter said he's "not claiming to be in the middle of all the decision-making" but is trying to help shape policy in a second Trump administration.

"I've been trying to help in as many ways as I can," Andreessen said. "Trump brings out a lot of feelings in a lot of people. People have very strong views. And then there are many political topics that, you know, we're very deliberately not weighing it on."

He added that he's "Not Mr. Foreign policy, or Mr. Abortion policy, or guns" because he's "not an expert on those things," but has instead focused his input on issues he does have experience in, like technology and economics.

"When I talk about these things, it's around tech policy, business, economics, and then, you know, the health of the country, the success of the country," Andreessen said.

Representatives for Andreessen and Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Andreessen was a vocal supporter of Trump's reelection bid. Business Insider previously reported he donated millions of dollars to a pro-Trump super PAC called "Right for America," and available data from OpenSecrets shows numerous donations to other Republican candidates and causes, such as the Republican Party of Michigan, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin, in the most recent election cycle.

Last month, Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the founders of the pair's powerful venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, celebrated Trump's win during an episode of their podcast, "The Ben and Marc Show."

"It felt like a boot off the throat," Andreessen said of Trump's reelection. "Every morning I wake up happier than the day before."

• Modern factories, supply chains and Amazon have turned 'stuff' into a commodity. 
• The same inevitable supply-and-demand dynamic could wash over us again with generative AI.
• The ultimate outcome may be a new limited-edition luxury item: Humans. 

"Live experiences are the new luxury good," Kevin Hartz said in 2013 when Eventbrite, the ticketing startup he cofounded, got a big new funding round.

By that point, modern factories, supply chains, and Amazon had boiled down "stuff" to a commodity. You can now buy an overwhelming variety of tennis shoes, or spatulas, or sweatpants online. This abundance has taken much of the satisfaction away from purchasing physical things. This is why experiences, which by definition are finite, became more valuable.

There are only a few opportunities to see Taylor Swift on stage, versus the availability to purchase more than 20,000 kinds of tennis shoes on Amazon. So the price of Eras tickets soar, and shoes are cheap.

The same inevitable supply-and-demand dynamic is about to wash over us again with large language models and generative AI.

The ultimate outcome could be a new limited-edition luxury item: Humans. 

Unlimited content vs 'finite resources'

AI models can now automatically generate text, software code, medical diagnoses, images, voices, music, video, and lots more. The barriers to using this technology are falling away quickly. Anyone can fire up ChatGPT, GPT-4, DALL-E and other tools to produce an almost unlimited quantity of content.

This should be a boon to society. Many tasks will be completed more efficiently, making products and services more affordable and accessible, as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently explained.

There will be a reaction though: In a world of machine-generated abundance, human-centered services and experiences will become increasingly rare, valuable, and therefore desirable.

"The world's information is being turned into 1s and 0s and all this is being commoditized," Hartz told BI. "What can't be commoditized is finite resources like real estate, travel, seeing the sunset on Mediterranean, or surfing in Fiji. These are the luxury goods of the power elite."

Cooks, tutors, and robo-advisors

The more that AI automates restaurants, the more we'll want personal chefs such as John Barone, who cooks five days a week in the home of a wealthy Silicon Valley couple.

As AI tutor bots proliferate in education, the richest will pay for more exclusive access to the best human tutors for their kids.

The more robo-advisors handle our money, the stronger the urge of the wealthy to recruit savvy human experts to manage their family offices.

A new flood of automated emails

Email marketing is a simple example that some technologists are already worried about.

Generative AI tools are making it much quicker and easier to write marketing copy. The end result will be a flood of new emails that will overwhelm recipients and make them even less likely to open the messages.

"And our own machines will read those AI automated sales emails," Hartz quipped.

So, either your marketing email won't reach the humans you're trying to engage, or another AI bot will open it and you'll never be quite sure who read the message. A hand-typed email from a real human will be, relatively speaking, a rare and beautiful thing (complete with typos).

AI tutors versus small classrooms

AI models are beginning to revolutionize education, according to Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy. His organization has been working with OpenAI models to coach students in powerful new ways and help teachers develop class plans.

The gold standard throughout history has always been to have a personal tutor, and AI models can help personalize the education experience to bring some of this curated approach to more students, he explained during a No Priors podcast earlier this year.

"We don't have the resources to give everyone a tutor," he said during the podcast. "A generative AI tutor supporting students. That's going to be mainstream in 3 to 5 years," he added.

Pricey schools and a personal carpenter

And yet, Silicon Valley's top private schools, where many tech execs send their kids, are all about getting access to human teachers in small group settings. 

Castillja in Palo Alto highlights a student to faculty ratio of 7 to 1. Nueva, a Silicon Valley school for gifted kids, promises a similar ratio. The Menlo School in Menlo Park says it has a student-teacher ratio of 10 to 1 in the upper school.

These institutions cost $58,000 to $60,000 a year and I don't see any drop-off in demand among the tech elite. They're still jostling to get their kids into these bespoke, human-centered learning environments.

One persistent, apocryphal Silicon Valley story illustrates this point. On weekends, one tech billionaire has been known to hire a personal carpenter to hand-make wooden toys for their kids build and play with.

Who manages the money?

What about when it comes to managing fortunes amassed by successful tech entrepreneurs? The wealthiest rely on talented financial advisors who are hired directly to oversee this money in family offices.

Bill Gates has his own private investment firm, Cascade, which has been run by money manager Michael Larson since 1994. Elon Musk's family office, Excession, has been run by a former Morgan Stanley banker called Jared Birchall for years.

Using AI for trading has been tough so far. AI models are trained on masses of data from the past. When new situations arise, they struggle to adapt quickly enough.

Even quantitative hedge fund firms, which use machine learning and other automated techniques, rely on humans. Two Sigma, a famous quant firm, is for the first time exploring ways to add traders who rely on their human judgment to make money, Bloomberg reported recently.

"The major challenge with using things like reinforcement learning for trading is that it's a non-stationary environment," AI researcher Noam Brown said on the No Priors podcast in April. He's worked on algorithmic trading strategies in the past and was a researcher at Meta before recently joining OpenAI.

"So you can have all this historical data but it's not a stationary system," he explained, referring to how markets respond swiftly to world events and other developments.

Part of the problem relates to what he calls sample efficiency. Humans are good at learning quickly from a small amount of data, while AI models need mountains of information to train on.

"Humans are very good at adapting to novel situations," he added. "And you run into these novel situations pretty frequently in financial markets."

Social media bots vs. martial arts

AI is making social media increasingly machine-driven, too. Soon, human content creators will be vying for attention with content generated by AI models.

Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled more than 25 new AI assistants with different personalities that use celebrities' images. Users will be able to interact with these bots on Meta's platforms in the future.

In a recent podcast, he described this new supply-and-demand situation well, saying human creators can't keep up with demand from followers.

"There are both people who out there who would benefit from being able to talk to an AI version of you," Zuckerberg explained. "You and other creators would benefit from being able to keep your community engaged."

So Meta will make an AI version of celebrities that can post constantly. Again, this will be infinite. And actually interacting with the real human celebrity will become more rare and valuable.

Meanwhile, when Zuckerberg is relaxing outside of work, he spends some of that time pursuing a very human pastime: Rolling around with other humans in martial arts contests.

Medical models and human doctors

AI models, such as Google DeepMind's Med-PaLM 2, are becoming incredibly good at answering medical questions and analyzing x-rays and other health data. But when wealthy parents have really sick children, they will still seek out the smartest doctors in the relevant fields of medicine.

You can see this in Silicon Valley's embrace of medical concierge services that provide special access to doctors and other human health specialists.

One Medical succeeded by offering better access to human doctors, and Amazon ended up buying it for almost $4 billion.

"We're inspired by their human-centered, technology-forward approach," an Amazon executive said when the deal was announced.

'Utility, value and signaling'

Hartz, a venture capitalist who now chairs Eventbrite's board, says successful technologists will continue to spend heavily on human experiences. But he says this depends on the activity and the motivations behind different actions.

He breaks this into "utility, value and signaling."

Many standard, common situations can be handled by software bots or even physical machines. Repetitive tasks at work and some educational functions are examples of these utility-type solutions.

In other situations, users will get more value from having machines handle the work, so humans can focus on more valuable tasks. If you're a well-paid machine-learning engineer, it will be better to have a robot clean your house so you can focus more on your job, he explained.

And then there will still many situations where humans will want to enjoy their success and signal the fruits of their achievements. And these activities will increasingly focus on finite human resources and experiences, Hartz said.

"You can't put on headset and pretend to be in Fiji," he added.

• Marc Andreessen discussed Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency on Joe Rogan's podcast.
• He criticized the "raw administrative power" of independent federal agencies like the SEC, FTC, and CFPB.
• The investor highlighted Musk's direct business approach as a model for government accountability.

Cut, baby, cut, Marc Andreessen says of Elon Musk's DOGE cost-reduction effort.

"It is time to carve this government back in size and scope," the Silicon Valley investor said during a recent appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast.

Andreessen, who founded the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz with his business partner, Ben Horowitz, is reportedly getting involved with Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and talked about the effort in the interview published Tuesday.

"It's time to take the overall tax load down," Andreessen added.

The investor railed against independent federal agencies such as the Securities Exchange Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and Federal Aviation Administration for scrutinizing industries like crypto, fintech, and drones.

Andreessen also called out the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and said his portfolio companies had multiple founders who had been targeted by the agency.

Established by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the agency was created to oversee the financial industry in 2010 following the financial crisis. It has since drawn criticism from the Republican Party.

It appears Musk shares Andreessen's dislike of the CFPB.

A day after Andreessen's interview with Rogan was published, Musk called to "delete CFPB" in a post on X and said there were too many regulatory agencies with the same purpose.

'What did you get done this week?'

Andreessen also criticized the number of federal workers who had not returned to the office since the pandemic and referenced Musk's approach to his Twitter takeover as a potential example of how federal workers could be held accountable for their productivity under DOGE.

The VC specifically referenced a text exchange that Musk sent then-CEO Parag Agrawal shortly after being appointed to Twitter's board. The exchange was revealed as part of the court battle over Musk's attempt to back out of buying the social network. At the time, Agrawal called out Musk for tweeting about Twitter dying and questioned the disruption his internal distractions were causing.

Musk responded with a series of texts questioning the CEO's productivity and his decision to resign from his board seat.

"What did you get done this week? I'm not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private," Musk said in the texts.

In the aftermath, Musk continued to criticize Twitter's leadership and told former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who took on a role as a mediator for the two, that Agrawal was "moving far too slowly and trying to please people."

The directness of Musk's texts contrasts with the slower pace of many Big Tech companies that can take months or years to meaningfully enact change, Andreessen said.

"Imagine that statement being applied to the government," Andreessen said, referencing Musk's "What did you get done this week?" message.

Musk's direct approach is one he has continued at his AI startup, xAI.

Andreessen referenced an xAI employee's recent post that said Musk recently spent 18 hours at the startup's office during which each employee had five minutes to update the billionaire on what they were working on.

The investor said that while Silicon Valley companies are typically well-run, Musk's in-person chats with every employee show a level of intensity that doesn't come close to the way most of them are operated.

"Every employee had opportunity to be recognized for their effort, every employee had an opportunity to get live feedback from the big boss," Andreessen said.

In a situation like that, he added, "there's no place to hide."

• Marc Andreessen says that AI-controlled jets are "far superior" to their crewed counterparts.
• Drones, he said, can move much faster because they don't have to carry a person.
• Andreessen's comments echo that of Elon Musk, who said this week that he thinks crewed fighter jets are inefficient.

Elon Musk isn't the only tech executive who thinks drones are way better than fighter jets.

Marc Andreessen, a cofounder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, made a similar comment during an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience that aired Tuesday.

AI-controlled jets, Andreessen told Rogan, are "far superior" to fighter jets that need pilots.

"And there's a bunch of reasons for that. And part of it is just simply the speed of processing and so forth," Andreessen said.

"But another big thing is if you don't have a human in the plane, you don't have the, as they say, the spam in the can, you don't have the human body in the plane," the venture capitalist continued.

"You don't have to keep a human being alive, which means you can be a lot faster, and you can move a lot more quickly," he added.

Representatives for Andreessen at Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Musk has been weighing in on the F35 fighter jet while advocating for drone warfare

Andreessen's comments to Rogan echo Musk's, who criticized the Pentagon's F-35 program in a series of X posts on Sunday.

"Crewed fighter jets are an inefficient way to extend the range of missiles or drop bombs. A reusable drone can do so without all the overhead of a human pilot," Musk wrote in one of his posts.

Musk continued to comment on fighter jets on Tuesday, making an X post responding to Andreessen's interview with Rogan.

"Future wars are all about drones & hypersonic missiles. Fighter jets piloted by humans will be destroyed very quickly," Musk wrote on Tuesday.

In the meantime, Silicon Valley has become increasingly interested in disrupting the defense sector.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he was a "licensed arms dealer" during a lecture he gave at Stanford University in April.

Schmidt said this was because he was working with Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun to mass-produce drones for Ukraine's ongoing war with Russia.

Then, in August, startup accelerator Y Combinator said it was backing its first weapons startup, Ares Industries. The company said it wants to make smaller and cheaper anti-ship cruise missiles.

Musk's remarks on the F-35 have taken on a heightened significance given his recent appointment as the co-lead of President-elect Donald Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Musk hasn't specified any cost cutting plans for the F-35 program. However, he did reference the Defense Department's $841 billion budget in an op-ed he wrote with his DOGE co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy for The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

"The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency's leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent," the pair wrote.

Drones have been game-changing in modern warfare, but military experts say there are still advantages to having manned fighter jets over drones.

Justin Bronk, a Royal United Services Institute airpower analyst, told BI that a human pilot's flexibility is "very difficult to replicate in an automatic system."

The viability of drone technology also needs to be weighed against the F-35's extensive bombing, surveillance, battle management, and communications capabilities. On that front, uncrewed aircraft are "simply not there," Mark Gunzinger, a retired US Air Force pilot and the director of Future Concepts and Capability Assessments at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told BI.

When approached for comment, a Pentagon spokesperson told BI on Monday that the US's combat-capable aircraft "perform exceptionally well against the threat for which they were designed."

"Pilots continually emphasize that this is the fighter they want to take to war if called upon," the spokesperson said.

• Donald Trump has surrounded himself with people who have competing views on AI regulation.
• Elon Musk, for example, has supported more AI regulation in the past.
• JD Vance, on the other hand, has called for less focus on regulation and more on innovation.

Some Silicon Valley veterans are betting that president-elect Donald Trump's new administration will make AI development a top priority.

"The campaign by woke Big AI to gain a regulatory capture cartel in Washington just imploded," venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who endorsed Trump and donated $2.5 million to a pro-Trump Super PAC, posted on X recently. "Stick a fork in it, it's over. The US will be the preeminent AI superpower in the world after all."

It might not be so simple, however. Trump has surrounded himself with people who have differing views on AI regulation.

On one hand, his allies are pushing hard to develop AI quickly. The Washington Post reported in July that some advisors close to Trump had drafted an executive order to intensify US attention to the technology, including plans for "Manhattan Projects" to develop AI military technology, new frameworks for evaluating AI models, and reviews of AI regulations signed by President Joe Biden. Trump himself promised to repeal Biden's executive order on AI in the interest of furthering innovation.

Elon Musk, however, may emerge as a figure of relative caution amid the new administration.

Musk, who spent over $130 million on Trump's campaign, has called for greater regulation of AI in the past. He supported California's SB1047 to regulate AI, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom ultimately vetoed. He also sued OpenAI, which he founded with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman to develop AI in a way that benefits humanity, accusing them of prioritizing profits over principles.

Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who is Musk's partner in the new Department of Government Efficiency, has also called for a close watch on the technology.

"Just like you can't dump your chemicals, if you're a chemical company, in somebody else's river, well if you're developing an AI algorithm today that has a negative impact on other people, you bear the liability for it," he said at a press conference last year. "I think AI can have a lot of good uses in this country. But there are also real risks."

Musk and Ramaswamy also plan to increase government efficiency through "regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings," they wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal this week.

It's not clear if that effort will impact their views on AI regulation. However, some in the tech industry expect Musk's influence on Trump to lead to softer regulations and a more vibrant climate for tech startups.

Vice President-elect JD Vance will likely be an ally of those hoping for reduced regulation. Vance, who spent a little under five years in Silicon Valley as both a venture capitalist and biotech executive, has been an advocate for reducing regulations on the technology.

At a Senate Committee hearing on privacy in July, Vance said Big Tech companies were too focused on new regulations for AI out of fear that the technology would destroy humanity. Such regulations, he said, could "entrench the tech incumbents that we actually have, and make it actually harder for new entrants to create the innovation that's going to power the next generation of American growth."

Those watching the new administration take shape say it's hard to tell which way it'll turn on AI.

"When it comes to Trump's policy decisions, there are few areas less predictable right now than AI," Calvin Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of several books on technology and work culture, wrote to Business Insider by email. "The incoming president will likely have JD Vance on one shoulder, arguing regulation will hurt our competitiveness with China, and Elon Musk on the other, arguing for productions against existential risks — it's anyone's guess which voice will prevail."

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who founded the military drone startup White Stork, spoke at the launch of his new book about AI and the future of the military and said he expected Trump to roll back regulations.

"I think a fair statement is that in the US, whatever regulations around trust and safety are going to occur are going to be very different and much later than I thought," he said. "Now, if you're an entrepreneur trying to do crazy stuff, this is good news. If you're a person who worries about the dangers of these tools, it's not good news."