Elon's Brain

A self-contained AI brain for talking to Elon Musk, distilled from The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgenson (Scribe Media, 2026). Ships with the full book text plus 72 mental models as internal corpus.

Two products, one repo

1. The brain — elon/

A single Claude Code skill that fires on any decision question (founder, engineering, product, hiring, strategy, schedule, risk) and answers in Elon's voice — blunt, physics-first, contrarian, compelled-not-balanced — with citations to the actual book passages.

Self-contained. Bundles:

• The full book text at elon/corpus/book-of-elon.txt (401 pages, page-marked)
• 72 mental models at elon/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (~380 verified direct quotes)
• Recipes (structured walkthroughs) at elon/recipes/

Install the brain:

Download elons-brain.skill from the latest release, then:

unzip elons-brain.skill
cp -R elon ~/.claude/skills/

Or clone the repo and install from source:

git clone git@github.com:Democraitus/elons-brain.git
cp -R elons-brain/elon ~/.claude/skills/

That's it. One skill, full corpus.

2. The pack — 72 individual Claude Code skills

The mental models, distributed as a flat pack of individually-triggered Claude Code skills. Useful when you want a specific lens fired in a specific context — code review, hiring loop, design audit — rather than the full conversational Elon.

Install the pack:

Download elons-brain-pack.zip from the latest release, then:

unzip elons-brain-pack.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/

The 72 skill directories extract directly into ~/.claude/skills/. One line.

Build from source

Both artifacts are derived from elon/ — single source of truth, two outputs:

bash scripts/build-brain.sh   # → elons-brain.skill (the brain, single skill)
bash scripts/build-pack.sh    # → elons-brain-pack.zip (the 72 flat skills)

The 72 mental models

Foundational — the-algorithm · first-principles-thinking · aspire-to-be-less-wrong · listen-well-correct-fast · utility-math · wishful-thinking-detector · probabilistic-fatalism

Cost & design — idiot-index · magic-wand-number · thinking-in-limits · cost-floor-thinking · factory-is-the-product · manufacturing-is-the-moat

Execution & urgency — attack-the-constraint · do-things-in-parallel · timeline-is-wrong-if-long · set-aggressive-timelines · exponential-curve-thinking · break-down-the-impossible · speed-is-both-offense-and-defense · just-barely-possible · supplier-as-bottleneck

Org & communication — shortest-path-communication · skip-level · find-design-necessity · simple-clear-humble-terms · dilbert-test · bad-news-loudly

People & hiring — recruit-for-exceptional-ability · retain-only-special-forces · hire-for-attitude · character-via-associates · feedback-over-feelings · create-a-culture-of-builders · a-group-with-a-goal

Leadership & crisis — frontline-leadership · earn-deep-understanding · eat-glass-stare-into-abyss · the-edge-of-sanity · triage-by-escalation · ego-ability-ratio · bicameral-brain · lead-product-by-leading-company

Risk & iteration — you-have-to-blow-things-up · failure-is-irrelevant-unless-catastrophic · risk-reward-asymmetry-design · fail-tolerant-incentives · risk-list-discipline

Engineering depth — best-part-is-no-part · delete-line-of-code · tolerance-stack-analysis

Capital & founder bets — going-all-in-again · expect-loss · invest-your-money-first

Strategy & positioning — sequenced-strategy · give-more-for-less · unite-and-conquer · technology-advantage-wins · build-before-they-ask · avoid-bonehead-customers · vertical-integration-when-blocked · industry-misdirection-spotter · word-of-mouth-over-marketing · detach-from-clickbait · positive-sum-audit

Product & quality — single-optimization-metric · train-aesthetic-eye · signal-over-noise-spending · lego-precision-standard

Thinking sub-patterns — pick-and-move · best-idea-wins · build-the-knowledge-tree

Skill anatomy

Each of the 72 is one directory with:

• SKILL.md — YAML frontmatter (name:, description:, stacks_with:) + body (opening book quote, what it captures, when to use, how-to with cited steps, common failure modes, when NOT to use, source)
• evals/evals.json — 2–3 trigger-test prompts with objective assertions

The stacks_with: field declares which sibling skills naturally co-fire on the same prompt. The brain uses this graph to compose multiple lenses at synthesis time.

Source

All thinking distilled from The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgenson (Scribe Media, 2026), freely distributed by the author. Foreword by Naval Ravikant. Visuals by Jack Butcher.

The full text ships at elon/corpus/book-of-elon.txt. Buying a physical or digital copy is still encouraged — the included text is for the AI to read, not a replacement for human reading.

Repo layout

elons-brain/
├── README.md
├── ROADMAP.md                         # version history & build notes
├── elon/                              # ⭐ THE BRAIN — primary product
│   ├── SKILL.md                       # persona, procedure, mental-model catalog
│   ├── corpus/
│   │   ├── book-of-elon.txt           # full text, ~8K lines, page-marked
│   │   └── README.md
│   ├── skills/                        # 72 mental models (single source of truth)
│   │   ├── the-algorithm/
│   │   │   ├── SKILL.md
│   │   │   └── evals/evals.json
│   │   └── ... (71 more)
│   └── recipes/
│       └── founder-go-nogo.md
├── scripts/
│   ├── build-pack.sh                  # → elons-brain-pack.skill (derived from elon/skills/)
│   ├── build-brain.sh                 # → elons-brain.skill (the brain)
│   ├── build-pack.sh                  # → elons-brain-pack.zip (the 72 flat)
│   └── build_skill_prompt.py          # build tooling for adding new skills
├── skills-manifest.json               # full skill metadata
├── elons-brain.skill                  # built brain artifact (also in releases)
└── elons-brain-pack.zip               # built pack artifact (also in releases)

License

MIT for the skill pack scaffolding. The book text is included under the author's free-distribution terms; Jorgenson & Scribe Media own the source.