“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.”
“If you need inspiring words, don’t do it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“For my part, I will never give up, and I mean never.”
“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.”
“When you struggle with a problem, that’s when you understand it.”
“I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
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