Elon runs six multi billion-dollar companies simultaneously (SpaceX, Tesla, X, xAI, Neuralink, and Boring Company). Most founders can’t run one. Walter Isaacson (who spent a year shadowing Elon and wrote his biography) explains ‘How Elon does it’ on a podcast. Thread 🧵

Silicon Valley cycle of life:. Everyone wants to be a manager, until they manage. Everyone wants to be VP, until they are VP. Everyone wants to be CEO, until they are CEO. Everyone wants to IPO, until they are public. Seen it a hundred times 😂.

Tobi comfortably sits at level 5 delegation compared to founders/CEOs who don't know it even exists

Most founders hit a ceiling when their company outgrows them. Lütke removed himself as the bottleneck by doing what most CEOs consider impossible:. Creating a culture where employees feel safe to make decisions without him.

The ultimate lesson from Tobi:. "Micromanagement isn't about controlling everything—it's about knowing exactly WHAT to control.". He spends 0 hours on most decisions, but will obsess for weeks over the 1% that define Shopify's future like this memo👇.

Lütke calls Shopify "the biggest small company in the world.". Translation: A network of autonomous teams with complete ownership. When Shopify moved with Shopify Plus, the division operated as its own startup. By 2018, Plus generated 25% of Shopify's revenue.

By 2015, Shopify's pre-IPO leadership structure was so robust they reached $1B in annual revenue with just 4,000 employees. For comparison, Walmart needed 1.2M employees to reach similar revenue numbers. This isn't about tech efficiency. It's about delegation leverage.

Lütke made his co-founder Daniel Weinand as Chief Culture Officer by 2012. This was something unheard of during that time and was considered a dumb move by Wall Street. The payoff? The culture scaled to 10,000 people without breaking.

3. Delegation. The 2009 strategic move:.Lütke opened Shopify's API, launching the Shopify App Store to delegate creating plugins for merchants to external developers. By 2017, the ecosystem included over 1,400 apps offering solutions for marketing, shipping, accounting and more.

2. Partner program. Shopify's partner program wasn't just distribution—it was delegation at scale. Design agencies get 20% of subscription revenue for life when they bring in merchants. Lütke turned thousands of small agencies into Shopify's growth engine.

When someone's trust battery hits 80-90% with colleagues, they're given complete ownership over an area—no approvals needed.

1. Trust battery. Lütke's "Trust Battery" concept transformed accountability:.Every new relationship starts at 50% charged. At Amazon, new engineers wait months for production access. At Shopify, interns deploy code to 100M shoppers in their first week.

The kind of impact Shopify has on merchants has been INSANE. The question is HOW he scaled it and what techniques he developed in order to stay there:.

Tobi treats his role as a temporary assignment: "I have a new job every year, and I have to requalify for it annually.". He tells the board to replace him if they find someone better suited for Shopify's next phase—a level of detachment most founders can't fathom.

Blockbuster had 9,000 stores and made $800M annually from late fees alone. They couldn't imagine a world without physical stores. And it did.

Blockbuster's death was perhaps the most preventable. In 2000, Netflix founder Reed Hastings offered to sell his company to Blockbuster for $50M. Blockbuster CEO John Antioco and his team "laughed them out of the room.". They saw Netflix as a niche player destined to fail.

Engineers and market data showed touchscreens were the future. Leadership overruled them. In just 5 years, BlackBerry plummeted from controlling 50% of the US smartphone market to less than 3%. They hemorrhaged $49B in market value because two men couldn't let go of physical

Their executives doubled down, citing internal surveys "proving" people didn't want touchscreens. They were catastrophically wrong. By 2013, when they finally launched touchscreens, it was far too late. Their market cap collapsed from $55B to $6B. The founders were forced out

BlackBerry's co-CEOs Lazaridis and Balsillie watched the iPhone launch and dismissed it. When asked why they ignored touchscreens, one executive admitted:. "We believed we knew better what customers needed long-term than they did."

By 2012, Kodak declared bankruptcy. $31B and 47,000 jobs vanished because executives refused to risk their cash cow by delegating resources to digital technology. They suppressed internal innovation because they couldn't let go of their tight grip on decision-making.

Not only this. Before Mark Zuckerberg wrote a line of Facebook’s code, Kodak made a prescient purchase, acquiring a photo sharing site called Ofoto in 2001. It was so close. Instead, Kodak used Ofoto to try to get more people to print digital images