Top 200 Elon Musk Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail.”

— Elon Musk

52. “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.”

— Elon Musk

53. “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.”

— Elon Musk

54. “I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.”

— Elon Musk

55. “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.”

— Elon Musk

56. “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.”

— Elon Musk

57. “That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: vacation will kill you.”

— Elon Musk

58. “What I’m trying to do is to maximise the probability of the future being better.”

— Elon Musk

59. “As you heat the planet up, it's just like boiling a pot.”

— Elon Musk

60. “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.”

— Elon Musk

61. “When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.”

— Elon Musk

62. “I’ve actually not read any books on time management.”

— Elon Musk

63. “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.”

— Elon Musk

64. “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?’”

— Elon Musk

65. “I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.”

— Elon Musk

66. “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.”

— Elon Musk

67. “We need to figure out how to have the things we love, and not destroy the world.”

— Elon Musk

68. “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.”

— Elon Musk

69. “Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.”

— Elon Musk

70. “Weighing someone’s talent too much and not their personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.”

— Elon Musk

71. “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.”

— Elon Musk

72. “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.”

— Elon Musk

73. “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.”

— Elon Musk

74. “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.”

— Elon Musk

75. “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.”

— Elon Musk

76. “I’m a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.”

— Elon Musk

77. “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.”

— Elon Musk

78. “If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.”

— Elon Musk

79. “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.”

— Elon Musk

80. “It’s a fixer-upper of a planet but we could make it work.”

— Elon Musk

81. “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.”

— Elon Musk

82. “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.”

— Elon Musk

83. “If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.”

— Elon Musk

84. “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.”

— Elon Musk

85. “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.”

— Elon Musk

86. “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.”

— Elon Musk

87. “There’s a real opportunity to have a vertical takeoff and landing electric supersonic jet.”

— Elon Musk

88. “America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.”

— Elon Musk

89. “Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It’s hard to break into a network once it’s formed.”

— Elon Musk

90. “The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.”

— Elon Musk

91. “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.”

— Elon Musk

92. “If you had to buy a new plane every time you flew somewhere, it would be incredibly expensive.”

— Elon Musk

93. “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.”

— Elon Musk

94. “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.”

— Elon Musk

95. “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.”

— Elon Musk

96. “Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.”

— Elon Musk

97. “My family fears that the Russians will assassinate me.”

— Elon Musk

98. “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.”

— Elon Musk

99. “I’m glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That’s cool.”

— Elon Musk

100. “If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.”

— Elon Musk