Elon Musk Quotes

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

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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 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.

~ Elon Musk

I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.

~ Elon Musk

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?'

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company's lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk

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

~ Elon Musk

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.

~ Elon Musk