When Elon Musk isn't launching SpaceX rocket ships or pulling all-nighters at the Tesla factory, the business mogul has a simple routine for coming up with new ideas: spending stretches of time letting his mind wander.

"Need to have long uninterrupted times to think. Can't be creative otherwise," Musk wrote in a tweet on Tuesday.

An article on the job search site Ladders asserts that Musk manages to get everything done by blocking out his day in five-minute intervals, but the Tesla CEO disputes the claim: "I definitely don't do this 5 minute thing," he wrote, because it would interfere with his ability to come up with new ideas.

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Musk has prioritized time to reflect for decades now. When he was a kid, his mother Maye says, Elon ignored people and zoned out so often that his parents and doctors ordered tests to check if he was deaf. She eventually got used to the habit. "He goes into his brain and then you just see he is in another world. He still does that," Maye recalls in Ashlee Vance's book, "Elon Musk." "Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something."