How To Answer Elon Musk’s Favorite Brain Teaser, And Others Like It

We’ve talked about job interviews and the types of questions interviewers like to ask in the past, but for today, I want to talk about a specific kind of question: Brainteasers. We’ve all had that interview where we were asked a question that threw us for a loop because we had no way to anticipate it, and no way to know if our answer was the “right” answer. This situation can leave a lot of people feeling uneasy and caught off guard, changing the outcome of the entire interview. Let’s breakdown brainteasers and how to beat them, specifically, Elon Musk’s that everyone has been talking about.

Imagine this: You walk into the doors of SpaceX and Elon Musk asks you the following

“You’re standing on the surface of the earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?”

To keep a short story short, the answer is the North Pole. On the Pole you would simply triangulate yourself back to where you started and many engineers interviewing at SpaceX were able to guess this correctly. Odds are, the majority of people reading this probably aren’t applying to SpaceX so you might ask, what’s it got to do with you.

The answer comes from my question in response, “how would you have answered this question?”. If you were sat in front of an interviewer right now and hit with this question, where would your mind go? The purpose of the question is not necessarily to produce the right answer, but rather test your critical thinking and problem solving. This means all you need to do, is show off your problem solving skills and see where you end up.

Vocalize your thought process to the interviewer and make it clear that you’re not pulling an answer out of nowhere. Take your time and really show them that you’re using all the tools at your disposal to come up with an answer. Trying to avoid the question or outsmart the interviewer is a no-go as it only makes you look dishonest and nobody wants someone like that on their team. Keep an open mind and don’t be afraid to guess wrong, even Elon Musk accepted people to his program who could not answer the question correctly.

Other types of teasers

Elon’s question above is more of a riddle as it does have a correct answer that you could arrive at pretty reasonably but some questions can seem incredibly daunting and impossible to actually get correct. One of these would be the “How many” questions.

“How many tennis balls fit into an average airplane hangar?”. These types of questions exist to test your critical thinking. Obviously they don’t expect you to get the number down to even close, but if you could, how would you?. You would start by figuring out how big an average airplane hangar is, then how big a tennis ball is. Afterwards, you would have to divide one number by the other and voila, you’d have some rough estimate. The interviewer would listen to how you attack the situation.

The next type of question that’s pretty common is the “Toddler why” type questions. These are the types of questions that a kid might ask that could genuinely stump you because you’ve never thought about such a thing before, you just knew it to be true.

“Why are tennis balls fuzzy?” This is a great example because so few people have ever pondered why a tennis ball would be fuzzy (including me). To vocalize your thinking here, just literally start to say the first things that come to mind. Repeat the question aloud and work from there. Maybe they’re fuzzy to increase friction so they don’t skid when they bounce? Maybe they’re fuzzy because otherwise they would be too loud? Whatever you think of is a good answer and the interviewer just wants to see your process. Are you able to come to any kind of logical conclusion? This type of question is where you should avoid faking any kind of expertise in an area. If you try to pretend that you know the answer when you don’t, it will come back to bite you because there 100% is a correct answer.

The last type of brain teaser that I want to talk about is the “Hard to explain”. These types of questions are there to test communication as well as critical thinking. They consist of a hypothetical situation where you would need to explain something to someone who has no chance of understanding what you want to explain. For example:

“How would you explain cable TV to a caveman?” These are pretty straightforward and never have a right answer. Questions like these tend to be my favorites as they allow a certain level of creativity that most questions don’t offer. Making your thought process is still important for these questions as well but making use of nonconventional means of communication will go even further. Using the cave man example, you could talk about cave paintings and make them move to show a story and relate that to TV. Obviously a caveman will never understand TV but that’s the fun of the question!

Stay prepared

These questions listed above are by no means the only types of brainteasers you could be asked at a professional interview but they are important to help you prepare. Knowing that getting stumped by not knowing the right answer is half the battle! The other half is being brave enough to show off your thought process and mental work. There are no wrong answers for most of them, since the answers aren’t what the interviewer is necessarily looking for. Just make sure to keep your head up, your voice confident, and your mind sharp!