50 Quotes from Elon Musk

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

2. “People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.”

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

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

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

6. “You have to say, ‘Well, why did it succeed where others did not?’”

7. “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.”

8. “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.”

9. “We have a strict ‘no-assholes policy’ at SpaceX.”

10. “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.”

11. “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.”

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

13. “Don’t delude yourself into thinking something’s working when it’s not, or you’re gonna get fixated on a bad solution.”

14. “As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies.”

15. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.”

16. “I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.”

17. “I don’t believe in the process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that ‘it’s all about the process,’ I see that as a bad sign. The problem is that at a lot of big companies, the 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.”

18. “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.”

19. “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?’”

20. “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.”

21. “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 workweeks and you’re putting in 100-hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.”

22. “If something has to be designed and invented, and you have to figure out how to ensure that the value of the thing you create is greater than the cost of the inputs, then that is probably my core skill.”

23. “My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.”

24. “Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is a disaster.”

25. “Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.”

26. “If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.”

“27. We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.”

28. “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.”

29. “There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multi celled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.”

30. “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.”

31. “We are the first species capable of self-annihilation.”

32. “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.”

33. “When I was a child, there’s one thing I said: ‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say. I don’t want to be alone.”

34. “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.”

35. “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.”

36. “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.”

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

38. “Selling an electric sports car creates an opportunity to fundamentally change the way America drives.”

39. “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.”

40. “The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.”

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

42. “I don’t believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that ‘it’s all about the process,’ I see that as a bad sign. 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.”

43. “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.”

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

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

46. “I do think there should be some regulations on AI.”

47. “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 engineered things around me.”

48. “I like the word ‘autopilot’ more than I like the word ‘self-driving.’ ‘Self-driving’ sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. ‘Autopilot’ is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.”

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

50. “If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.”