180 Inspiring Quotes by Elon Musk

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

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

I'm interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you're like, 'Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?'

Great companies are built on great products.

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.

Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.

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.

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.

It's not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it's a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere.

We polled Tesla owners, do you want autopilot disabled or not. Not one person wanted it disabled. That's pretty telling.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I'd like to dial it back 5% or 10% and try to have a vacation that's not just e-mail with a view.

My opinion is it's a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.

Automotive franchise laws were put in place decades ago to prevent a manufacturer from unfairly opening stores in direct competition with an existing franchise dealer that had already invested time, money and effort to open and promote their business.

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It's the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

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.

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.

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 really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It's a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that's what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn't even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we'd never have had the light bulb.

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

You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.

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.

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.

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

For all the supporters of Tesla over the years, and it's been several years now and there have been some very tough times, I'd just like to say thank you very much. I deeply appreciate the support, particularly through the darkest times.

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

Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.

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

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.

Stationary storage will be as big as the car business long term. The growth rate will probably be several times what it is for the car business.

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.

A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies.

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.

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

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.

If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.

In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.

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

The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.

It's obviously tricky to convert cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.

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.

I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

Tesla is becoming a real car company.

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment -- my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

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.

Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure -- the law firms, the real estate, all that -- that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.

I'm glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That's cool.

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.

If you look at space companies, they've failed either because they've had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.

I think long term you can see Tesla establishing factories in Europe, in other parts of the U.S. and in Asia.

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

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.

It's important that we attempt to extend life beyond Earth now. It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it's been possible, and that window could be open for a long time -- hopefully it is -- or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now.

I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.

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.

It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.

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.

The U.S. automotive industry has been selling cars the same way for over 100 years, and there are many laws in place to govern exactly how that is to be accomplished.

Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.

If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

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'm personally a moderate and a registered independent, so I'm not strongly Democratic or strongly Republican.

It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don't think it's possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.

There's nothing -- I've bought everything I want. I don't like yachts or anything; you know, I'm not a yacht person, and I've got pretty much the nicest plane I'd want to have.

Mars is the only place in the solar system where it's possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

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

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.

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.

Focus on signal over noise. Don't waste time on stuff that doesn't actually make things better.

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

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.

I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad.

No matter how hard you work, someone else is working harder.

If life is a video game, the graphics are great, but the plot is confusing and the tutorial is way too long.

My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.

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.

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.

When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength -- 400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well, it's really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn't afraid of the dark anymore after that.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Many things are improbable, only a few are impossible.

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

There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Actively seek out and listen carefully to negative feedback.

I think you should always be seeking negative feedback.

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

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?'

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The X is an amazing car, but we kind of got carried away with the art and technology. Obviously, you want great art. You want great technology. But we did get a little distracted from our mission, which was to advance the cause of electric vehicles. And it probably delayed us a little bit with the Model 3 as well.