Elon musk quotes

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

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.

We have this handy fusion reactor in the sky called the sun, you don't have to do anything, it just works. It shows up every day.

I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don't retire before I go senile, then I'll do more damage than good at that point.

The extension of life beyond Earth is the most important thing we can do as a species.

Some people don't like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.

I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful...With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon.

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.

An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.

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.

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.

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

I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.

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.

If something's important enough, you should try. Even if you - the probable outcome is failure.

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.

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

If anyone thinks they'd rather be in a different part of history, they're probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You'd probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.

We have a strict 'no a-hole policy' at SpaceX. And we fire people they are. I mean, we give them a little bit of warning. But if they continue to be an a-hole, then they're fired.

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.

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.

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

We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.

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.

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

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.

And we need things in life that are exciting and inspiring. It can't just be about solving some awful problem. There have to be reasons to get up in the morning.

I'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power, and most likely a majority... in less than 20 years.

If you go back 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.

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.

I always had an existential crisis, trying to figure out ‘what does it all mean?’ I came to the conclusion that if we can advance the knowledge of the world, if we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then, we’re better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened. That’s the only way to move forward.

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.

Don't be afraid of new arenas.

Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done.

I don't think it's a good idea to plan to sell a company.

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?'

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.

What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.

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.

You want to do things you’re passionate about but also are useful to other people.

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

Patience is a virtue, and I'm learning patience. It's a tough lesson.

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.

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

The thing that's worth doing is trying to improve our understanding of the world and gain a better appreciation of the universe and not to worry too much about there being no meaning. And, you know, try and enjoy yourself. Because, actually, life's pretty good. It really is.

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.

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

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.

I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

When you struggle with a problem, that's when you understand it.

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

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.

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.

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

Actively seek out and listen carefully to negative feedback.

What I'm trying to do is to maximise the probability of the future being better.

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

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

Focus on something that has high value to someone else, be really rigorous in making that assessment, because natural human tendency is wishful thinking, so the challenge to entrepreneurs is telling what's the difference between really believing in your ideals and sticking to them as opposed to pursuing some unrealistic dream that doesn't actually have merit, be very rigorous in your self analysis, certainly being extremely tenacious, and just work like hell. Put in 80-100 hours every week. All these things improves the odds of success

People often mistake technology for a static picture. It's less like a picture and more like a movie. It's the velocity of technology innovation that matters. It's the acceleration.

One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree - make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.

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.

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.

Humans need to be a multiplanet species.

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.

Constantly seek criticism. A well thought out critique of what you're doing is as valuable as gold

I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

If humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.

I hate writing about personal stuff. I don't have a Facebook page. I don't use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don't use them.

People should pursue what they're passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

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.

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.

Life is too short for long-term grudges.

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

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

In order for us to have a future that's exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we're a space-bearing civilization.

You should be innovating so fast that you're invalidating your prior patents.

I think there are more politicians in favor of electric cars than against. There are still some that are against, and I think the reasoning for that varies depending on the person, but in some cases, they just don't believe in climate change - they think oil will last forever.

I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I'm really good at email.

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

You want to have a future where you’re expecting things to be better, not one where you’re expecting things to be worse.

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.

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.

Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing you know that you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.

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.

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.

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

The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it's going to become multiplanetary, or it's going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there's going to be an extinction event.

Most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying.

Many things are improbable, only a few are impossible.

I think you should always be seeking negative feedback.

With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.

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.

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

When people really understand it's do or die [and] if we work hard and pull through, it's going to be a great outcome; people will give it everything they've got.

Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.

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.

Great companies are built on great products.

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

America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.

For me it was never about money, but solving problems for the future of humanity.

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems... It's got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

You could power the entire United States with about 150 to 200 square kilometers of solar panels, the entire United States. Take a corner of Utah... there's not much going on there, I've been there. There's not even radio stations.

I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.

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

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

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

My motivation for all my companies has been to be involved in something that I thought would have a significant impact on the world.

As a child I would just question things.

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

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.

I started SpaceX with the expectation of failure.

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

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

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.

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 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.

Weighing too much on someone's talent and not someone's personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.