Elon Musk Quotes

“The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad.”

“I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.”

“The tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but […] once you do that, the rest is really easy.”

“We can't have, like, willy-nilly proliferation of fake news. That's crazy. You can't have more types of fake news than real news. That's allowing public deception to go unchecked. That's crazy.”

“If you're co-founder or CEO, you have to do all kinds of tasks you might not want to do. If you don't do your chores, the company won't succeed. No task is too menial.”

“Don't be afraid of new arenas.”

“Obviously Tesla is about helping solve the consumption of energy in a sustainable manner but you need the production of energy in a sustainable manner.”

“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.”

“Entrepreneurship is like eating glass and walking on hot coals at the same time”

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

“I think there should be regulations on social media to the degree that it negatively affects the public good.”

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

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

“For my part, I will never give up, and I mean never.”

“I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.”

“If you're entering anything where there's an existing marketplace, against large, entrenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs. It can't be a little bit better, because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer... you're always going to buy the trusted brand unless there's a big difference.”

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

“Particularly Instagram, people look like they have a much better life than they really do. People basically seem like they are way better-looking than they really are, and they are way happier-seeming than they really are.”

“Government isn't that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you've got to have commercial companies do it.”

“Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”

“The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.”

“If we could do high-speed rail in California just half a notch above what they've done on the Shanghai line in China, and if we had a straight path from L.A. to San Francisco, as well as the milk run, at least that would be progress.”

“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.”

“No I don't ever give up. I would have to be dead or completely incapacitated”

“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.”