From a Wall Street Journal story by Tim Higgins headlined “Behind Elon Musk’s Management Philosophy: First Principles”:

Linda Yaccarino understands the assignment.

Or at least that is what her first staff-wide memo as Twitter CEO suggests. In it, she showed she was in tune with a key management philosophy of her new boss, Elon Musk. That is his total embrace of the so-called first principles approach for problem solving, a mixture of physics and philosophical reasoning that breaks issues into their very basics and doesn’t simply rely on what has been done before.