Elon Musk Quotes

“My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail.”

“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.”

“I started SpaceX with the expectation of failure.”

“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.”

“Optimism, pessimism, f**k that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.”

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

“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.”

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

“I read books and talked to people. I mean that's kind of how one learns anything. There's lots of great books out there & lots of smart people.”

“It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive.”

“I've been to Disneyland, like, 10 times. I'm getting really tired of Disneyland.”

“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.”

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

“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 think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Actively seek out and listen carefully to negative feedback.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Great companies are built on great products.”

“The path to the CEO's office should not be through the CFO's office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.”

“Here in the West, people often don't like listening to their leaders, even if they are right.”

“Physics is a good framework for thinking. ... Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.”

“I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.”

“The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”

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

“Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That's pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.”

“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.”

“The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication.”

“I’m nauseatingly pro-American. I would have come here from any country. The U.S. is where great things are possible.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.”

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

“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.”

“I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.”

“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.”

“It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.”

“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.”

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

“Humans need to be a multiplanet species.”

“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.”

“I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”

“I think whenever something is - whenever there's something that affects the public good, then there does need to be some form of public oversight.”

“I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”