Jon McNeill

You can work in an Apple store and you are an order taker.

Go down the hall to the people at the Microsoft store who have to sell a slate two doors down from a MacBook Air.

Those people know how to sell.

The fact that they're not starving is unbelievable.

So the context is Elon and I are having these discussions.

We're getting to know each other.

And eventually he pops the question.

He said, why don't you join?

My first reaction is, I'm not sure I'm your guy.

Like your company's twice as big as my biggest company already.

Don't you need a big company guy?

And he says, no, no, that's the opposite of what I need.

I need a fellow entrepreneur who knows what it's like.

Like David, you named him.

Yeah, totally.

He's like, I need a fellow entrepreneur who knows what it's like to chew glass and look into the abyss, his famous quote, and you know how to allocate capital.

And no big company person's going to know that.

So I said, why don't you let me go poke around the business?

What is your biggest challenge right now?

And he said, oh, biggest challenge is top line.