Elon Musk Quotes: The Ultimate Collection
This post is an ultimate collection of Elon Musk quotes.
Currently this post it is the largest collection of Elon Musk quotes on the Internet.
Top Elon Musk Quotes
There are over 200 quotes in total on this post and as I discover great new Elon Musk quotes I will add them to this post.
Additionally I plan to add more graphic versions of the quotes on this page over time.
The Elon Musk quotes on this page are divided into multiple sections.
The sections are:
- Elon Musk Innovation Quotes
- General Elon Musk Quotes (the majority of quotes are in this section.)
- Elon Musk Quotes About SpaceX
- Elon Musk Quotes About Tesla
- Elon Musk Quotes About Mars
- Elon Musk Quotes About The United States
- Elon Musk Quotes About Silicon Valley
- Elon Musk Quotes About Neuralink & OpenAI
Enjoy the Elon Musk quotes and be sure to share this great collection with your friends!
Elon Musk Innovation Quotes
“Innovation comes from questioning the way things have been done before.” ~Elon Musk
“What makes innovative thinking happen?… I think it’s really a mindset. You have to decide.”
“The company with the higher rate of innovation will unequivocally win long term.” ~Elon Musk
“Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive, and determination of the people behind it as the product they sell.”
“You shouldn’t do things differently just because they’re different. They need to be better.”
“What matters is the pace of innovation. It is a fundamental determinant to competitiveness.”
“When somebody has a breakthrough innovation, it is rarely one little thing. Very rarely, is it one little thing. It’s usually a whole bunch of things that collectively amount to a huge innovation.”
“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.”
General Elon Musk Quotes
“If you don’t sacrifice for what you want, what you want will be the sacrifice.” ~Elon Musk
“I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.” ~Elon Musk
“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.”
“You’ve got to try. Believe in yourself and try. People can do way more than they think.”~Elon Musk
“It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.”
“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.”
“Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”
“The future is coming fast.” ~Elon Musk [Click to Tweet]
“People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.”
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
“Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic.”
“We are the first species capable of self-annihilation.”
“Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.”
“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.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.”
If Tesla & SpaceX go bankrupt, so will I. As it should be.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2019
“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’s very important to like the people you work with, otherwise life [and] your job is gonna be quite miserable.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”
“I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.”
whether that response made sense given everything else I knew.”
“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’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?’”
“Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.”
“You have to say, ‘Well, why did it succeed where others did not?’”
“I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.”
“As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies.”
“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?’”
“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.”
“If there was a way that I could not eat, so I could work more, I would not eat. I wish there was a way to get nutrients without sitting down for a meal,”
“If the odds are probably in your favor, you should make as many decisions as possible within the bounds of what is executable”
“I’m not an alien … but I used to be one”
“You’re already a cyborg. Most people don’t realize you’re already a cyborg…”
“The list of people that would not mind if I were gone is growing”
“There’s a billion-to-one chance we’re living in base reality”
“I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need to find a girlfriend. That’s why I need to carve out just a little more time. I think maybe even another five to 10 — how much time does a woman want a week? Maybe 10 hours? That’s kind of the minimum? I don’t know.”
“I think public transport is painful,” he reportedly said. “It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end?”
In the 2018 documentary, “Do You Trust This Computer?,” Musk said if a company or group of people created “god-like superintelligence,” the AI could exert control over humans for eternity.
“It’s breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why they came to America or built this country.”
“I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”
“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.”
“Life is too short for long-term grudges.”
“You want to have a future where you’re expecting things to be better, not one where you’re expecting things to be worse.”
“I take the position that I’m always to some degree wrong, and the aspiration is to be less wrong.”
“I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.”
“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.”
“I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.”
“Everything works in PowerPoint; but if you have the physical item or some demonstration software, that’s much more convincing to people than a PowerPoint presentation or a business plan.”
“History is written by the victors … except on Wikipedia haha.”
“I usually describe myself as an engineer; that’s basically what I’ve been doing since I was a kid.”
“Don’t confuse schooling with education. I didn’t go to Harvard but the people that work for me did.”
“The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.”
“I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.”
“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.”
“It would be an incredible adventure. And life needs to be more than just solving every day problems. You need to wake up and be excited about the future”
“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.”
“Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.”
“I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.”
“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’d like to dial it back 5% or 10% and try to have a vacation that’s not just e-mail with a view.”
“In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.”
“The factory is the machine that builds the machine.”
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.
“America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.”
“I’m personally a moderate and a registered independent, so I’m not strongly Democratic or strongly Republican.”
“If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.”
“AI is much more advanced than people realize. … Humanity’s position on this planet depends on its intelligence so if our intelligence is exceeded, it’s unlikely that we will remain in charge of the planet.”
“We must pass the great filter!” [Elon Tweet]
“Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.”
“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.”
“As you heat the planet up, it’s just like boiling a pot.”
“If you had to buy a new plane every time you flew somewhere, it would be incredibly expensive.”
“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.”
“A utility can handle up to 20% of production from solar and that helps the grid because it produces electricity when needed. Solar power peaks in the middle of the day and that’s also when air conditioning is running and businesses are operating, so power production matches usage.”
“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.”
“In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Guardian is the most insufferable newspaper on planet Earth.”
“I’m anti-tax, but I’m pro-carbon tax.”
“A Prius is not a true hybrid, really. The current Prius is, like, 2 percent electric. It’s a gasoline car with slightly better mileage.”
“Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.”
“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.”
“The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.”
“Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Generally, the view that I’ve had on Twitter is if you’re on Twitter, you’re in, like, the meme – you’re in meme war land. If you’re on Twitter, you’re in the arena. And so, essentially, if you attack me, it is therefore OK for me to attack back.”
“The problem with car dealerships is you’ve already decided what you want to buy before you even go there, and you’re really just going there to talk through some annoying negotiation.”
“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.”
“People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it will, I think, by itself degrade, actually. You look at great civilizations like Ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And then the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts. They forgot how to do it.”
“Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.”
Elon Quotes About The United States
“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.”
“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.”
“Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.”
Musk criticized the government’s response to the corona virus outbreak: “Give people back their goddamn freedom.”
“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’m a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.”
“The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.”
“I’m reasonably optimistic about the future, especially the future of the United States – for the century, at least.”
“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.”
Elon Musk Quotes About SpaceX
“SpaceX has the potential of saving the U.S. government $1 billion a year. We are opposed to creating an entrenched monopoly with no realistic means for anyone to compete.”
“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.”
“I’m trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.”
“I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.”
“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.”
“I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.”
“We have a strict ‘no-assholes policy’ at SpaceX.”
“If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.”
“I always have optimism, but I’m realistic. It was not with the expectation of great success that I started Tesla or SpaceX… It’s just that I thought they were important enough to do anyway.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The pace of progress on Mars depends upon the pace of progress of SpaceX.”
“I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.”
“If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.”
“Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.”
Elon Quotes About Tesla and Electric Cars
“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.”
“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.”
“The goal of Tesla is to accelerate sustainable energy, so we’re going to take a step back and think about what’s most likely to achieve that goal.”
“We polled Tesla owners, do you want autopilot disabled or not. Not one person wanted it disabled. That’s pretty telling.”
“Great companies are built on great products.”
“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.”
“Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Even if there’s a zombie apocalypse, you’ll still be able to travel using the Tesla Supercharging system.”
“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.”
“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.”
Elon expressed frustration over Ford trademarking a vehicle name he’d planned to use at Tesla. “Like why did you go steal Tesla’s E? Like you’re some sort of fascist army marching across the alphabet, some sort of Sesame Street robber?” he said.
“If you don’t make it at Tesla you go work at Apple.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Winning ‘Motor Trend’ Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.”
“I’m glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That’s cool.”
Elon Musk Quotes About Mars
“Nuke Mars!”
“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.”
“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.”
“We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.”
“I don’t get the little ship thing. You can’t show up at Mars in something the size of a rowboat. What if there are Martians? It would be so embarrassing.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Holy flying fuck, that thing took off!” Elon’s reaction to Falcon Heavy”
“You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.”
“Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.”
“I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.”
“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.”
“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.”
Neuralink & OpenAI
“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.”
“We need to improve the bandwidth and with a direct neural interface we can improve the bandwidth between the cortex and the
“People are already a cyborg in that you already hare a teritiary digital layer…You’ve got your limbic system which is your primitive drives and desires and responses…and then you’ve got your cortex which is like your long term planning and thinking, and those are your two biological layers, and then there is your teritiary layer, a third layer, which is digital in the form of your phones and computers and applications so at some point the computer gets smart enoughit’s like the computer is trying to talk to a tree.
Trees do sort of talk but they talk so slow that we don’t notice…so we need to improve the bandwidth. And with a direct neural interface we can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital teritiary layer by many orders of magnitude. I’d say probably at least 1,000 or maybe 10,000 or more. And we could also spend alot more time thinking about interesting things as opposed to taking complex thought structures, compressing them down into words – which is again very low bit rate – and then having someone else recieve those words, decompress them, and then send words back at you.
So a huge amount of brain power is spent on compression/decompression and we could be instead spending it on deeper context. And so if you had a neuralink you could do conceptual telepathy. Where you have a complex series of concepts and you can transfer them directly uncompressed to the other person. This would massively improve the ability of communication and the speed of it.” (Elon Musk on Clubhouse, Jan 31st, 2021)
“There are other sort of pretty wild things that could be done. Like you could probably save state in the brain so if you were to die your state could be returned in another human body or a robot body.” (Elon Musk on Clubhouse, Jan 31st, 2021)
Conclusion
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