Listening to Joe Justice's videos, I have now also developed more confidence the culture and MO of Elon's "cybernetic collective" companies will last long after he leaves (or dies or is completely incapacitated, in his words).
Apparently, nearly all teams at Tesla form ad hoc by people self-selecting with whom to work on a particular problem. The entire organization of over 10,000 employees is more of an heavily interconnected small society of equals spontaneously optimizing their own tiny, well-defined slice of the mission. The social network at the company more closely resembles a densely connected graph than a tree. Everything is organized according to highly visible public interfaces, like APIs. This is basically a mix of object-oriented and functional programming of software to manipulate atoms. Hence why "errors in the product reflect errors in the organizational structure."
With clearly designed inputs and outputs, everyone in the company can see what everyone else in the company is doing. All data is openly readable by anyone in the company, which Joe J calls "radical transparency" as opposed to information hiding. This transparency, plus the continual churn between teams builds a wide web of trusting relationships between employees while also making it much easier to question the constraints on one's own input/output definition imposed by other teams.
Each 4-7 person team basically consists of representatives with all necessary skills for that task, plus some kind of robot, automatic test procedure, and usually some machine learning model and traditional software automation accelerating design.
It is clear to me that this kind of culture will long outlast the current leadership team. It's a cult, and not the kind that ends with the death of the founder. It's essentially a new religion rooted in radical rationality like this:
The Methods of Rationality - LessWrong.
And here's the craziest part. Elon is essentially using his companies as ongoing experiments in social structure based on spontaneous self-governance, extreme personal freedom and responsibility, normalized altruism and issue-based direct democracy for the Mars colony.
Moral of the story: "How much can we do in parallel?"
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