“If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it.”
— Elon Musk
“I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.”
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
“I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”
“No, I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.”
“Don’t be afraid of new arenas.”
“I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”
“Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”
“People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.”
“Pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it, particularly from friends. Hardly anyone does that, and it’s incredibly helpful.”
“You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.”
“Life is too short for long-term grudges.”
“Life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems. It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.”
“There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.”
“Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.”
“The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”
“Great companies are built on great products.”
“It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.”
“You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that’s wrong with it and fix it. Seek negative feedback, particularly from friends.”
“I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact.”
“If you need inspiring words, don’t do it.”
“Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.”
“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.”
“I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.”
“When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.”
“You want to have a future where you’re expecting things to be better, not one where you’re expecting things to be worse.”
“I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.”
“For my part, I will never give up, and I mean never.”
“My motivation for all my companies has been to be involved in something that I thought would have a significant impact on the world.”
“The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.”
“When I started SpaceX I thought that the most likely outcome was failure. And I think to have any other expectation would have been irrational.”
“Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell.”
“When you struggle with a problem, that’s when you understand it.”
“We’re running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.”
“If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.”
“The idea of lying on a beach as my main thing just sounds like the worst. It sounds horrible to me. I would go bonkers. I would have to be on serious drugs. I’d be super-duper bored. I like high intensity.”
“If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.”
“I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”
“It is remarkable how many things you can explode. I’m lucky I have all my fingers.”
“If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.”
“Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.”
“I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple’s product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.”
“Most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying.”
“There are some important differences between me and Tony Stark, like I have five kids, so I spend more time going to Disneyland than parties.”
“Many things are improbable, only a few are impossible.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.”
“Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.”
“If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.”
“I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved.”
“There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.”
“My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail.”
“Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.”
“I’ve actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don’t mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.”
“I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.”
“As you heat the planet up, it's just like boiling a pot.”
“Don’t just follow the trend. You may have heard me say that it’s good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles. Which is, rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there.”
“That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: vacation will kill you.”
“What I’m trying to do is to maximise the probability of the future being better.”
“I think there are too many smart people pursuing internet stuff, finance, and law. That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.”
“When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.”
“Going from PayPal, I thought: ‘Well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?’ Not from the perspective, ‘What’s the best way to make money?’”
“I’ve actually not read any books on time management.”
“I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.”
“Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.”
“We need to figure out how to have the things we love, and not destroy the world.”
“Weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.”
“I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It’s the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.”
“I wouldn’t say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I’d like my fear emotion to be less because it’s very distracting and fries my nervous system.”
“Talent is extremely important. It’s like a sports team, the team that has the best individual player will often win, but then there’s a multiplier from how those players work together and the strategy they employ.”
“The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.”
“When we got Tesla going at the very beginning, if you asked me what I thought the odds of success were, I would have said less than 50%. I would have said that failure is the most likely outcome.”
“I want to make rockets 100 times, if not 1,000 times better. The ultimate objective is to make humanity a multiplanet species. Thirty years from now, there’ll be a base on the moon and on Mars, and people will be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets.”
“Funded by the government just means funded by the people. Government, by the way, has no money. It only takes money from the people. Sometimes people forget that that’s really what occurs.”
“I’m a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.”
“To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That’s what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games. Nothing like saving the world.”
“If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.”
“If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.”
“It’s a fixer-upper of a planet but we could make it work.”
“The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.”
“Every mode of transport that we use – whether it’s planes, trains, automobiles, bikes, horses – is reusable, but not rockets. So we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization.”
“Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.”
“The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.”
“I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.”
“It’s just mind-blowingly awesome. I apologize, and I wish I was more articulate, but it’s hard to be articulate when your mind’s blown-but in a very good way.”
“It’s really incumbent upon us as life’s agents to extend life to another planet. I think that being a multi-planet species will significantly increase the richness and scope of the human experience.”
“Even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we’re going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.”
“There’s a real opportunity to have a vertical takeoff and landing electric supersonic jet.”
“The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.”
“If you had to buy a new plane every time you flew somewhere, it would be incredibly expensive.”
“A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery.”
“America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.”
“I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.”
“Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It’s hard to break into a network once it’s formed.”
“My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.”
“Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.”
“It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don’t think it’s possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.”
“My family fears that the Russians will assassinate me.”
“I’m glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That’s cool.”
“You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.”
“If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.”
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