Elon Musk Quotes

I taught myself how to program computers when I was a kid, bought my first computer when I was 10 and sold my first commercial program when I was 12.

~ Elon Musk

It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

~ Elon Musk

In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a [?], like a collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

Great companies are built on great products.

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

If something's important enough, you should try. Even if you - the probable outcome is failure.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

Rockets are cool. There's no getting around that.

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I'm really good at email.

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.

~ Elon Musk

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

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

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk