Elon Musk Quotes
Entrepreneur, Engineer, Inventor
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.
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.
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.
Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.
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 get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it's not.
If something's important enough, you should try. Even if you - the probable outcome is failure.
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.
Some people don't like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.
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.
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 would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.
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.
In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.
Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done.
It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.
Patience is a virtue, and I'm learning patience. It's a tough lesson.
Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.
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.
With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and he's like, yeah, he's sure he can control the demon? Doesn't work out.
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.
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.
I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I'm really good at email.
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 life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems... It's got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.
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.
Mars is the only place in the solar system where it's possible for life to become multi-planetarian.
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.
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.
If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth.
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.
Rockets are cool. There's no getting around that.
There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
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.
Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.
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'd like to dial it back 5% or 10% and try to have a vacation that's not just e-mail with a view.
I usually describe myself as an engineer; that's basically what I've been doing since I was a kid.
I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.
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.
I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I've got kids and responsibilities, so I can't be my own test pilot. That wouldn't be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it's a sensible thing to do.
When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.
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.
Great companies are built on great products.
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.
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.
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 humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.
Life is too short for long-term grudges.
I don't think it's a good idea to plan to sell a company.
People should pursue what they're passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.
America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.
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.
I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.
I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.
I don't spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.
I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.
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've actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don't mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.
I think there should be regulations on social media to the degree that it negatively affects the public good.
Yeah, well I think anyone who likes fast cars will love the Tesla. And it has fantastic handling by the way. I mean this car will crush a Porsche on the track, just crush it. So if you like fast cars, you'll love this car. And then oh, by the way, it happens to be electric and it's twice the efficiency of a Prius.
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.
I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.
If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.
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.
A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery.
What I'm trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.
I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.
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.
In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.
Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.
Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code - with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It's very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.
From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.
I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.
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.
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.
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.
My opinion is it's a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.
I'm glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That's cool.
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.
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.
It is theoretically possible to warp spacetime itself, so you're not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but it's actually space that's moving.
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.
I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
As you heat the planet up, it's just like boiling a pot.
Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.
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.
I've been to Disneyland, like, 10 times. I'm getting really tired of Disneyland.
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.
Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.
Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive.
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.
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 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.
We could definitely make a flying car - but that's not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that's super safe and quiet? Because if it's a howler, you're going to make people very unhappy.
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.
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.
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?'
My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars - this is very important - so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there.