Quotes by Elon Musk

Don't be afraid of new arenas.

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

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.

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

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

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

If you need inspiring words, don't do it.

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

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

Pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it, particularly from friends. Hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful.

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

They were building a Ferrari for every launch, when it was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick.

I could go and buy one of the islands in the
Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and
create a new company.

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.

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

So we originally expected to make about 35 gigawatt hours at the cell level and about 50 gigawatt hours at the module or pack level. Now we are expecting to do about 150 gigawatt hours in the same volumetric space as the original design.

I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.

I do think there should be some regulations on AI.

The pace of progress on Mars depends upon the pace of progress of SpaceX.

The key to making things affordable is design and technology improvements, as well as scale.

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.

Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.

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

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'm trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.

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

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

I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I just try to think about the future and not be sad.

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.

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

If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.

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.

It is true that SpaceX is partially a government contractor, but it would be unfair to say that SpaceX is entirely a government contractor.

If we're going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.

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

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

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

You need to live in a dome initially but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on. ... So it's a fixer-upper of a planet.

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

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.

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?'

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

I think you should always be seeking negative feedback.

Actively seek out and listen carefully to negative feedback.

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.

In the case of Apple, they did originally do production internally, but then along came unbelievably good outsourced manufacturing from companies like Foxconn. We don't have that in the rocket business. There's no Foxconn in the rocket business.

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

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'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.

With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like, yeah, he's sure he can control the demon. Didn't work out.

There's a real opportunity to have a vertical takeoff and landing electric supersonic jet.

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

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.

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.

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.

We're already cyborgs. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you, but the interface is through finger movements or speech, which are very slow.

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

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.

There's no better place in the world for technology start-ups than Silicon Valley; there's such an incredible well of talent and capital and resources. The whole system is set up to foster the creation of new companies.

I'm a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.

So, there's quite a big keep-out zone, and when you factor the keep-out zone into account, the solar panels put on that area would typically generate more power than that nuclear power plant.

On one of the SpaceX flights, we had a secret payload: a wheel of cheese. We flew to orbit and brought it back, so it was the world's first 'space cheese.' It was, in part, a tribute to Monty Python.

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

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.

To our knowledge, life exists on only one planet, Earth. If something bad happens, it's gone. I think we should establish life on another planet -- Mars in particular -- but we 're not making very good progress. SpaceX is intended to make that happen.

The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment.

Buy and hold stock in companies where you love the product roadmap, sell where you don't.

I mean, I think that if people are concerned about volatility, they should definitely not buy our stock. I'm not here on an earnings call to convince you to buy Tesla stock. Do not buy it if volatility is scary. There you go.

The overarching goal of Tesla is to help reduce carbon emissions and that means low cost and high volume. We will also serve as an example to the auto industry, proving that the technology really works and customers want to buy electric vehicles.

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.

Even if there's a zombie apocalypse, you'll still be able to travel using the Tesla Supercharging system.

I wish we could be private with Tesla. It actually makes us less efficient to be a public company.

I care very deeply about the people at Tesla. I feel like I have a great debt to the people of Tesla who are making the company successful.

If you don't have sustainable energy, you have unsustainable energy. The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy faster than it would otherwise occur.

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.

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

Many things are improbable, only a few are impossible.

It is remarkable how many things you can explode. I'm lucky I have all my fingers.

If you go 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.

When I started SpaceX I thought that the most likely outcome was failure. And I think to have any other expectation would have been irrational.

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

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

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact.

You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that's wrong with it and fix it. Seek negative feedback, particularly from friends.

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

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

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

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

If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it.

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.

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.