Elon Musk’s ingenious question to discover lies in job interviews

Ever Elon Musk He said: “It is a mistake to hire many people to do a complicated job. Numbers will never compensate for talent: two people who don’t know how to do something are no better than one, since they will slow down the process and the task will be even more difficult…”

Always controversial, the owner of Tesla, Space X and the social network He is one of the most powerful and influential people in the world. Born in Pretoria, South Africa (6-28-1971) and naturalized American (2002), today he is the strong man of the president-elect of that country, Donald Trump, and will occupy a place in the government from 2025 (Co-director of the Department of Government Efficiency of the White House with Vivek Ramaswamy).

His phrases, compiled in biographies such as that of Walter Isaacson and Ashlee Vance, or posted directly on X, the social network it bought in 2022, they always attract attention. Of course, Elon Musk talks about almost any topic, but he also has referred to the riddles and questions he asked during job interviews to get Space X personnel.

One of the questions he asked, he assures, allowed him to discover who, In order to get the position, they lied about their previous experience. An intelligent curiosity about this man who Forbes magazine, in its index of billionaires in real time, puts in first place with 252.4 billion dollars in July 2024.

In the biography of Elon Musk by writer Ashlee Vance, titled The businessman who anticipates the futureit is claimed that Musk encouraged solving the following puzzle in some interviews to recruit engineers. “You are standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north and you end up exactly where you started. Where are you?” (the answer, at the end of this article).

However, this was not the way he identified liars or those who exaggerated their work experience in order to get the job (something quite common, by the way).

In 2017, during the World Government Summit, the businessman revealed his tactics. “My interview questions are always the same. I say: Tell me the story of your life and the decisions you made along the way and why you made them. Also, tell me about some of the hardest problems you’ve worked on and how you solved them”.

He then explained that “The people who actually solved the problem know exactly how they solved it. They know the small details. The people who intended to solve the problem may be able to go to one level, and then they get stuck.”

The question, at first glance, may seem simple. However, it is a fairly sophisticated way to catch liars, as it takes advantage of so-called Asymmetric Information Management (AIM).

This approach to psychology improves verbal lie detection by encouraging truth-tellers to provide more information. Because, in fact, Those who have solved complex problems will be able to give details about their experience and the solutions they found.

Instead, Those who try to hide the truth or exaggerate their achievements tend to offer vague answers and avoid details.

A study published in 2020 in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, supports Musk’s strategy because he affirms that small details are essential in investigations police and forensic as they provide facts that can be verified and the names of witnesses to question.

Liars provide little or no information to hide their guilt because providing more information would make it easier to detect their lies.

Meanwhile, the answer to the riddle at the beginning: You are standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north and you end up exactly where you started. Where are you?. It can only have the following response: I’m at the North Pole.