It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate fo... — Elon Musk

It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive.

Author: Elon Musk

Insight: There's a real tension here that most of us feel at work but don't talk about directly. We've all been on teams where adding more people somehow made things worse—more meetings, more confusion, more time spent coordinating instead of actually doing. The assumption that "more hands make light work" breaks down pretty fast when the work requires real thinking. The counterintuitive part isn't that talent matters—everyone knows that. It's that incompetence doesn't scale. You can't solve a hard problem by stacking mediocrity. Two people who don't understand the core issue won't magically understand it together; they'll just slow each other down while feeling busy. This applies whether you're debugging code, writing strategy, or solving a customer problem. The marginal value of an extra person drops off a cliff once you've assembled people who actually grasp what you're trying to do. This doesn't mean stay understaffed or work everyone to burnout. It means being honest about what kinds of work actually benefit from more people versus which ones just need the right people. It's a useful reality check when you're tempted to throw headcount at a problem instead of finding someone who knows what they're doing.

Source: Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science, 2007