Elon Musk Quotes

“The biggest mistake, in general, I've made, is to put too much of a weighting on someone's talent and not enough on their personality. And I've made that mistake several times. I think it actually matters whether somebody has a good heart, it really does. I've made the mistake of thinking that it's sometimes just about the brain.”

“Fear is a hard thing to deal with. I feel it quite strongly. If I think something is important enough, I'll make myself do it in spite of fear. But it can really sap the will. I hate fear, I wish I had it less.”

“The only reason I was able to accomplish things is the great people willing to work with me. A company is a group of people organized to create a product or service, and that product or service is only as good as the people in the company - and how excited they are about creating it. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. Without them, I would have accomplished very little. I just happen to be the face of the companies.”

“As a child I would just question things.”

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

“We could definitely make a flying car - but that's not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that's super safe and quiet? Because if it's a howler, you're going to make people very unhappy.”

“When I was a child, there's one thing I said: 'I never want to be alone.' That's what I would say. I don't want to be alone.”

“You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that's wrong with it and fix it.”

“I have made the mistaken assumption - and I will attempt to be better at this - of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season. And that is my mistake.”

“Let's think beyond the normal stuff and have an environment where that sort of thinking is encouraged and rewarded and where it's okay to fail as well. Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea... well a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you're not gonna get people coming up with ideas.”

“There's a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.”

“Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.”

“Starting a business is not for everyone. Starting a business - I'd say, number one is have a high pain threshold.”

“Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.”

“I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don't believe in the whole thing of just using other people's money. I don't think that's right. I'm not going to ask other people to invest in something if I'm not prepared to do so myself.”

“I usually describe myself as an engineer; that's basically what I've been doing since I was a kid.”

“I'm anti-tax, but I'm pro-carbon tax.”

“If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth.”

“Man has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”

“You shouldn't do things differently just because they're different. They need to be... better.”

“I always see what’s... wrong. Would you want that? When I see a car or a rocket or spacecraft, I only see what’s wrong. I never see what’s right. It’s not a recipe for happiness.”

“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.”

“I'm increasingly inclined to think there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish.”

“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.”

“I think that's an important thing to do, to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful.”