The Alignment Theory: How to Significantly Improve the Returns of Your Effort
You’re probably missing out on lots of gains & impact because of misaligned effort.
Published in
10 min readAug 7, 2024
Before discovering Tesla, Elon tried AC Propulsion’s prototype electric car — the tZero. He was blown away by it.
He immediately told the founders, Tom Gage and Alan Cocconi, “You have to turn this into a real product. That could really change the world.”
But Gage, the company’s then president, was hesitant to commercialize their product and instead wanted to build a cheaper, boxier car to target the general public.
However, this strategy didn’t align with market behavior.
- Even with reduced costs, an initial version of an electric car would cost at least $70,000.
- Electric cars were a new technology, so trust hadn’t been established yet.
- It was unlikely that middle-class consumers would gamble their hard-earned money on a new, still-expensive type of car.
It made no sense to Elon. “Nobody is going to pay anywhere near that for something that looks like crap,” he argued. For weeks Elon kept asking them to make a fancy roadster. “Everyone thinks electric cars suck, but you can show that they don’t,” he…
