Comment by burningChrome

This goes way back further then Musk. I remember working at a large corporation in early 2000 before the first dot com crash that had severe meeting issues. At one point, I was having two or three hour long meetings during the week on what another meeting later in the week was supposed to cover.

The CEO of the company got caught fooling around with a co-worker and abruptly resigned. The new CEO came in and found out what a mess meetings had become and issued the same proclamation - if a meeting isn't productive and produce some actionable items, then it shouldn't be scheduled. If you're not 100% required in a meeting, don't go. If you're in a meeting and feel its a waste of time, then leave.

Just those simple rules got rid of half of my meetings and the several teams I was on suddenly were cranking through sprints, building some amazing apps and products and killing our delivery times. The entire company suddenly was cooking along. It was a real eye opener how you can really bog a Fortune 500 company down just by clogging people's time up with useless meetings.