65 Elon Musk Quotes About Life, Business, and Technology

1. "I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right."

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

3. “You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”

4. “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.”

5. “Life needs to be more than just solving problems every day. You need to wake up and be excited about the future.”

6. "Some people don't like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster."

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

8. "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."

9. “I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”

10. “If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules.”

11. "I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself."

12. "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."

13. “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.”

14. “One of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask. Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy”

15. “Many people will panic to find a charger before their phone dies. But won't panic to find a plan before their dreams dies.”

16. “If you give yourself 30 days to clean to clean your home, it will take you 30 days. But if you give yourself 3 hours, it will take your 3 hours. The same applies to your goals, ambitions and potential.”

17. "When you struggle with a problem, that's when you understand it."

18. "Many things are improbable, only a few are impossible."

19. "Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up."

20. "Life is too short for long-term grudges."

21. "I could either watch it happen or be a part of it."

22. "Most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying."

23. "For my part, I will never give up, and I mean never."

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

25. "You want to have a future where you’re expecting things to be better, not one where you’re expecting things to be worse."a

1. “You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve”

2. “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.”

3. “The first step is to establish that something is possible then probability will occur.”

4. “Stop being patient and start asking yourself, how do I accomplish my 10-year plan in 6 months? You will probably fail but you will be a lot further ahead of the person who simply accepted it was going to take 10 years.”

5. “Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.  ”

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

7. "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."

8. “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.”

9. “You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that’s wrong with it and fix it. Seek negative feedback, particularly from friends.”

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

11. "I don't spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems."

12. "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."

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

14. "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."

15. "Starting a business is not for everyone. Starting a business - I'd say, number one is have a high pain threshold."

16. “Working hard to make useful products & services for your fellow humans is deeply morally good.”

17. “Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell."

18. "Any product that needs a manual to work is broken."

19. "Great companies are built on great products."

20. "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."

1. "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."

2. “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.”

3. “One of the biggest mistakes we made was trying to automate things that are super easy for a person to do, but super hard for a robot to do.”

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

5. "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."

6. "Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do."

7. "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."

8. "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?'"

9. "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."

10. "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."

11. "Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive."

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

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

14. "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."

15. "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."

16. “Science is discovering the essential truths about what exists in the Universe, engineering is about creating things that never existed”

17. “If humanity is to become multi-planetary, the fundamental breakthrough that needs to occur in rocketry is a rapidly and completely reusable rocket … achieving it would be on a par with what the Wright brothers did. It’s the fundamental thing that’s necessary for humanity to become a space-faring civilization. America would never have been colonized if ships weren’t reusable.”

18. “If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea.”

19. “I wonder how many dead one-planet civilizations are out there in the cosmos that never made it to the other planet and ultimately extinguished themselves or were destroyed by external factors. Probably a few.”

20. “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.”