On top of walking out of long meetings, he also suggests ending lengthy phone calls and ignoring rules if they're obviously ridiculous. That last one is tough - and perhaps open to wild interpretation - your idea of a dumb rule might be different to mine, but his objective is sound: increased productivity.
But Musk's wake-up call regards the state of humanity and reminds me of a new book on how the world is actually better than we think it is, it's just our ignorance preventing us from seeing it that way.
Professor of International Health and global TED talker Hans Rosling wrote a book called 'Factfulness' which talks about how instinct distorts our perspective, how we divide the world into two simple camps (us and them), how we consume fear-based media, and how our perception of progress is that things are getting worse.
All of our views, he argues, are informed by unconscious bias.
He claims people are suffering from an over-dramatic world view which leads to bad decisions and stress.
He says progress is often silent and secret, we're unaware of it. He claims the world, for all its imperfections, is actually quite impressive.
Factfulness, he argues, is merely adopting the stress reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. He argues the importance of facts in a post-truth world.
More often that not, we guess or assume we know facts, we don't. He says a chimpanzee could outguess most people on the stuff we profess to know.
Adding to this tribal divide and fear-based approach is of course the amount of 'fake news' we get fed.
So differentiating between fact and fiction has never been harder for us. But if Elon Musk's late breaking epiphany on humanity is anything to go by, we can all be buoyed by the fact that a) we are indeed quite capable, and according to Hans Rosling, b), that the world is not actually such a bad place after all.
