When Elon's $1B automation mistake turned into a tent full of humans In 2018, Tesla was trying to scale Model 3 production. We were just getting started, but the targets were impossibly aggressive.

We had to hyper-scale before we even figured out how to put a battery pack together. Elon's answer was to fully automate the Fremont factory, and it was a complete disaster that almost burned the company down.

As a solution, we ended up setting up a giant tent outside in the parking lot, throwing humans at the problem to keep cars moving off the line.

But the BEST part is how we fixed it: Elon lived on the factory floor, embedding himself into every single bottleneck on the assembly line until he understood what was actually breaking and why.

That experience taught me two things about how we should approach AI today: the cautionary tale of what goes wrong when you try to scale before you understand the work, and the best practice of what it looks like when you actually do it right.