"Calculate the magic-wand number before engineering anything Musk described a technique he uses to establish the theoretical cost floor of any product: list all the raw material constituents, find their raw material value, and ask what it would cost if you could "wave a magic wand and rearrange the atoms into the final shape." That number, he explained, "is almost always a very low number" — meaning what makes products expensive is entirely the process of shaping atoms, not the atoms themselves. Anyone designing a product or pricing a service should calculate this floor first, so they know whether the gap between current cost and ideal cost is a physics problem or an engineering one. Source: Elon Musk, Lex Fridman Podcast, Elon Musk"