How Elon Musk Disregards Toyota's Strategy

The world's most famous innovator and most respected manufacturing system are two different animals.

- REY ELBO

Elon Musk's style fundamentally clashes with the Toyota Production System (TPS)—the gold standard for global operational excellence based on kaizen or never-ending improvement and employee empowerment.

Born out of decades of disciplined management engineering, TPS has been emulated around the world and is shaped by what we now call "lean thinking." Meanwhile, Musk—the high-profile CEO behind Tesla, SpaceX and now, xAI—embodies speed, disruption and reinvention.

Both have achieved astonishing success through different paths. TPS runs on stability, standardization and a Zen-like belief in doing one thing a little better each day. If TPS were a person, it would sort its spice rack alphabetically and instruct family members to do the same.

Musk's style? It's more like throwing all the spices into a pressure cooker and hoping to discover the next Sriracha, Thailand's famous hot chili sauce.

TPS emphasizes stability, standardized work and incremental change. Success comes not from flashy breakthroughs, but from thousands of small, steady improvements made by employees at every level. Musk, by contrast, operates at a dizzying speed, breaking problems down to their fundamentals and reconstructing them to get fresh insights.

He's known for discarding traditional processes, setting aggressive deadlines, and betting big on unproven solutions. In other words, TPS is a refiner's toolkit, while Musk is a reinventor by nature.