110+ Elon Musks Quotes: April 2023
Elon Musks Quotes About Success
“Tesla team is awesome, such an honor to work with them!”
“Too much respect for authority inhibits innovation.”
“It’s very difficult to start companies and quite painful… Think of it this way: if you need inspiring words, don’t do it.”
“Just looking for problem-solvers who get things done with a high sense of urgency. Don’t care if or where they went to school.”
Interviewer: “Someone told me before this interview that you work in a cubicle?” Elon: “I have a desk, yeah… it’s important to maximize communication… the more you insulate yourself from the organization… the worse decisions you make.”
“People do not think critically enough. Critical thinking is a skill in short supply. People assume too many things to be true without sufficient basis in that belief.
Elon Musk Quotes About Technology
“Software engineering, server operations & design will rule the roost”
“Perhaps more people might consider loving humanity. Our collective light of consciousness is a tiny candle in a vast darkness. Please do not let it go out.”
“Won’t be long before we view gasoline cars the same way we view steam engines today.”
“Tesla is to protect life on Earth, SpaceX to extend life beyond.”
“Instagram is an envy amplifier.”
“Money is just data that allows us to avoid the inconvenience of barter.”
“I don’t think we should try to have people live for a really long time. That’d cause asphyxiation of society because the truth is, most people don’t change their mind. They just die. So if they don’t die, we will be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn’t advance”
“Most people have no idea Starship exists or how large this beast is! Body diameter (9m or 30 ft) is bigger than a 747 or A380. Starship thrust & mass are more than double Saturn V moon rocket. Making life multi-planetary means massive rockets. Got to be done.”
“Software engineering, server operations & design will rule the roost”
“If you care about the reality of goodness instead of the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult.”
“The rocket business is definitely not a low-stress business, that’s for sure.”
“There are definitely roles for patents. In the case of Tesla, our goal is to advance sustainable energy and we can’t just do it by ourselves, we need the whole industry to go that way, so we gave them our patents for free in order to help them accelerate electric vehicles.”
“The true battle is between fiat & crypto. On balance, I support the latter.”
“Starship is designed to carry people & cargo around Earth (also to moon & Mars). Vast majority of use will be civilians. It’s just like an airline in space. All airlines sometimes carry military cargo, but ~99% is civilian.”
“If you’re able to get great people to join the company, work together towards a common goal and you have a relentless sense of perfection about that goal, then you will end up with a great product.”
“I try to sort of figure out what’s the right amount of sleep. I found I could drop below a certain threshold and although I would be awake more… I would get less done because mental acuity would be affected… the right number for me is around 6-6.5 hours.”
“US national debt is ~$28,900 billion or ~$229k per taxpayer. Even taxing all “billionaires” at 100% would only make a small dent in that number, so obviously the rest must come from the general public. This is basic math. Spending is the real problem.”
“Science fiction should not be fiction forever!”
“I think the reality of being president is that you’re actually like a captain of a very huge ship that has a small rudder.”
“I think, certainly, we need to take a look at our immigration laws. If there are really talented people doing graduate courses and engineering at our universities, we really don’t want to send them home.”
“Reasons to hate are remembered better than reasons to love. An evolutionary asymmetry helpful to survival, but counterproductive when survival is not at stake.”
“30 years ago, when 98% of scientists said smoking caused cancer, tobacco industry response was still ‘scientists disagree’”
“World violence being super low is probably counter-intuitive to most people. That’s because modern media is a misery microscope.”
“Now that the big automotive advertisers are making EVs, you will see far fewer articles about EVs catching on fire. It is not surprising that internal combustion engine cars have a tendency to combust externally too.”
“Yeah, kids starting with lots of money usually have much less motivation than those who have nothing. When we started our first company (Zip2) in 95, I had over $100k of student debt, a computer I built myself and a few thousand dollars.”
“I am primarily trying to advance two causes: sustainable energy & extending life/consciousness beyond Earth. There is also the existential threat of AI, which we should aspire to mitigate.”
“I do so wish that more companies would put down their spreadsheets for a moment and focus on making products that move your heart.”
“If you see the difference between a startup that is successful and one that is not, it’s because they both made mistakes but the successful one recognized the mistakes and fixed them very quickly, and the unsuccessful one tries to deny that the mistakes exist.”
“Don’t be afraid of failure, but you also need to be rooted in reality… it’s easy to get high on your own supply. You’ve got to not be afraid to innovate but don’t delude yourself into thinking something is working when it’s not.”
“With our giant casting machines, we are literally trying to make full-size cars in the same way that toy cars are made.”
“There are already minimum age requirements for the House, Senate & Presidency. Reciprocally, there should be maximum age limits too.”
“As a general principle, for those looking for advice from this thread, it is generally better to own physical things like a home or stock in companies you think make good products, than dollars when inflation is high. I still own & won’t sell my Bitcoin, Ethereum or Doge fwiw”
“We also have a rule that if somebody’s in a meeting and finds that this meeting is not helping them in a meaningful way and they’re not contributing to the meeting, they should just leave.”
“Engineering is magic made real.”
“If you scare people enough, they will demand removal of freedom. This is the path to tyranny.”
“Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.”
“Humans drive with eyes & biological neural nets, so makes sense that cameras & silicon neural nets are only way to achieve generalized solution to self-driving.”
“Physics is the law, everything else is a recommendation.”
“A beautiful thing about Twitter is how it empowers citizen journalism – people are able to disseminate news without an establishment bias.”
“If somebody comes and makes a better electric car than Tesla, and it’s so much better than ours that we can’t sell our cars and we go bankrupt, I still think that’s a good thing for the world.”
“Think about who might have decided “The Current Thing” before accepting it.”
“Fuel cells should be called fool sells! Such a silly choice for cars. Not great even for a rocket upper stage imo, but at least not absurd.”
“People shouldn’t think, ‘Well, I feel fear about this and therefore I shouldn’t do it.’ It’s normal to feel fear, there would have to be something mentally wrong with you if you didn’t feel fear.”
“Don’t be afraid of new arenas, you know, you can get a book and you can learn something and experiment with your hands and just make it happen. Find a way or make a way to get something done.”
“Just showing up is half the battle… you got to try hard to do it and don’t be afraid of failure.”
“It is unfortunately common for many in academia to overweight the value of ideas & underweight bringing them to fruition. For example, the idea of going to the moon is trivial, but going to the moon is hard.”
“Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app”
“I would love to just do innovation and just do engineering, but you raise a good point because a lot of life in general in any job you have to do your chores. To be successful in anything you have to do the tough stuff as well as the enjoyable stuff.”
“It’s designed to make life multiplanetary, otherwise extreme overkill for mere Earth sector activity! Starship fleet mass to orbit per year will be more than 1000 times all current Earth rockets combined, including Falcon. Necessary, for a city on Mars.”
“Physics should be taught with the majesty & beauty it deserves”
“Humor relies on an intuitive & often awkward truth being recognized by the audience, but wokeism is a lie, which is why nobody laughs.”
“I am a strong believer in doing the reality of good over the perception of good. So we’re just gonna take the heat. If we know we’re gonna get sued despite doing the right thing, we will do the right thing and get sued.”
“Self-driving car will amplify traffic to insane levels, as you won’t feel the pain of driving yourself.” [The Boring Company’s goal is to solve this]
Elon Musks Quotes for students
“Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”
“Anxiety is a scalar, fear is a vector.”
“Education is the path out of poverty and Internet access enables education.”
“Does it really make sense for me to spend time designing and building a house? I would be real OCD on the little details and the design… or should I be allocating that time to getting us to Mars? I should probably do the latter.”
“My interview questions are always the same; tell me the story of your life, and the decisions you made along the way and why you made them. And then also tell me about some of the most difficult problems you’ve worked on and how you solved them.”
Elon Musks Quotes About the Future
“We can’t be one of those lame one-planet civilizations!”
“Make humanity a multiplanet species!”
“The rocket business is definitely not a low-stress business, that’s for sure.”
“Civilization will be mostly solar-powered in the future.”
“Starship will be crushingly cost-effective for Earth orbit or moon missions as soon as it’s operational & rapid reuse is happening. Mars is a lot harder, because Earth & Mars only align every 26 months, so ship reuse is limited to ~dozen times over 25 to 30 year life of ship.”
“Tesla will argue for autonomous driving, but we’re not going to argue against manual driving. I believe people should have the freedom to choose to do what they want to do.”
“We always try to do the right thing [at Tesla]. We really care about that. When we make mistakes, it’s just because we were being foolish or stupid or whatever.”
“I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things, but almost all my time, like 80% of it is spent on engineering and design.”
[on Mars habitability] “There’s a lot of frozen CO2 & H2O on Mars. Heating the planet will densify the atmosphere. It’s solvable.”
[when asked about the Mars legal system] “Let the Martians decide their own future.”
“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with profit. In fact, profit just means that people are paying you more for whatever you’re doing than you’re spending to create it. That’s a good thing.”
“Focus on signal over noise. A lot of companies get confused, they spend money on things that don’t actually make the product better. For example, at Tesla we’ve never spent any money on advertising, we put all the money into R&D, manufacturing and design…”
“Public support for life on Mars is critical to making it happen.”
“Never trust cynics, as they excuse their own bad deeds by telling themselves everyone does it.”
“I’m working on sustainable energy cars & solar that help Earth and making life multiplanetary, to ensure its continuance, with SpaceX.”
“Unless susceptible to extreme natural disasters, nuclear power plants should not be shut down.”
“Few seem to realize that China is leading the world in renewable energy generation and electric vehicles. Whatever you may think of China, this is simply a fact.”
“If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic; being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle.”
“We’re trying as best as possible to do the right thing for the advancement of electrification; even if that diminishes our competitive advantage.”
[on early Tesla days] “I went down to zero cash or sellable assets in 2008/2009, had no house & had to borrow money from friends to pay rent.”
“Even if you’re the best of the best there’s always a chance of failure so I think it’s important that you really like whatever you’re doing. If you don’t like it, life is too short.”
“Profit just means that people are paying you more for whatever you’re doing than you’re spending to create it. That’s a good thing. And if that’s not the case you’ll be out of business and rightfully so, because you’re not adding enough value.”
“Tesla is responsible for 2/3 of all the personal & professional pain in my life combined. But it was worth it.”
“I have so much respect for the associates doing an honest day’s work at Tesla or SpaceX building & servicing cars, rockets, Starlinks, batteries, solar & many other things.”
“If we are able to make life self-sustaining on Mars, we will have passed one of the greatest filters. That then sets us up to become interstellar. Earth is ~4.5B years old, but life is still not multiplanetary and it is extremely uncertain how much time is left to become so.”
“The problem is that patents are generally used as a blocking technique, they’re like using landmines in warfare. So, they don’t help advance things they just stop others from following you. Most patents are BS.”
Elon Musk quotes about life
“Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.”
“Don’t kill what you hate, Save what you love”
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light of consciousness.”
“What is the purpose of the universities at this point? I think it’s mostly just to hang out with peers, have some fun, and talk to your friends.”
“Money, in my view, is essentially an information system for labor allocation, so it has no power in and of itself; it’s like a database for guiding people as to what they should do.”
“Much of what people think of an science is actually engineering, eg no such thing as a “rocket scientist”, only rocket engineers. Latter is who put humans on the moon.”
“Production is hard. Production with positive cash flow is extremely hard.”
“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.”
Elon Musks Quotes About Govt.
“Politics is war and truth is the first casualty.”
“Goal of government should be to maximize the happiness of the people.”
“Politicians & political parties should be supported on their merits, not like they are one’s favorite sports team.”
