Elon Musk says weekly skip-level meetings expose the 'glazed' lieutenants every CEO trusts. A typical Fortune 500 CEO held a meeting once a month. Their direct reports presented prepared slides. Their direct reports' reports never made the room. The CEO heard the version of reality their VPs wanted them to hear. "I have these very detailed engineering reviews weekly." Skip-level. No agenda. No prep. Everyone in the room. All reports flow up at once. The format was designed to make pre-meeting choreography impossible. Run the meeting before it runs you. Then Musk named what choreography produces. "Otherwise you're going to get glazed, as I say these days." Musk named the corporate disease: **glazed**. Polished. Predictable. Almost useless. Musk, who ran weekly engineering reviews across Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, knew the glaze on sight. A direct report with 48 hours to prepare an answer would deliver the version of reality that protected their team, their roadmap, and their compensation — while the engineer two levels below them, asked the same question cold, would say what was actually happening on the floor. "I just go around the room. Everyone provides an update." No slides. No deck. No script. Question and answer, traded live. After Musk standardized the format, corporate truth started matching shop-floor truth. Bad news arrived earlier. Course corrections happened faster. Compensation arguments shortened. Musk, on what the weekly cadence buys: "It's a lot of information to keep in your head." What in your weekly meetings is already a rehearsal nobody admits to? P.S. I made a playbook breaking down 100+ most powerful decision making mental models used by history's greatest thinkers. 5,000+ downloads. 113 five-star reviews. Grab a free copy here: If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content. — Elon Musk ( @elonmusk ), CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Dwarkesh Patel's ( @dwarkesh_sp ) podcast