Elon Musk

Possessions weigh you down. They’re an attack vector.

Constantly think about how you could be doing things better. Keep questioning yourself.

I’m a big fan of anyone who wants to build. Anyone who wants to make more than they take has my respect.

I have great respect for anyone who makes useful products or provides useful services to their fellow human beings.

Don’t aspire to glory. Aspire to work.

If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day.

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

Read books, because the data rate of reading is much greater than when somebody is speaking.

The Internet is a great leveler for information and education. You can learn anything online for free.

Don't worry about robots putting people out of jobs. We already have a massive shortage of labour. We will still have a shortage of labour even in the future.

I try to work as much as possible - to the edge of sanity. Every good hour or even minute of thinking about Tesla or SpaceX has such a big effort on the company. It makes sleeping difficult.

If something is important enough, even if the odds are stacked against you, you should still do it.

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

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

A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle.

My children didn’t choose to be born, I chose to have children. They owe me nothing, I owe them everything

I’m a big believer that a small number of exceptional people who are highly motivated can do better than a large number of people who are pretty good and moderately motivated.

If Tesla & SpaceX go bankrupt, so will I. As it should be.

Adversity shaped me. My pain threshold became very high.

If a timeline is long, it’s wrong.

It's a real weakness to want to be liked, a real weakness, and I do not have that.

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.

You shouldn't do things differently just because they're different. They need to be... better.

If you go back 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. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

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

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems... It's got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

Trust nothing, not even nothing.

If life is a video game, the graphics are great, but the plot is confusing and the tutorial is way too long.

I think there was like literally one week where I actually worked 120 hours and just didnt leave the factory. I didnt even go outside

I feel fear quite strongly. Its not as though I have the absence of fear. But there are times when something is important enough, you believe in it enough, that you do it in spite of fear.

Be stronger than those who hate you, so that they cannot destroy you, and then forgive them.

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.

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.

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.

My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-launch within a few hours of landing.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Life is too short for long-term grudges.

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

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

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

Even a small increase in Earth's gravity would make it impossible to launch Starship.

If you aren't getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren't ambitious enough.

The window to make Earth life multiplanetary is open for the first time in 4.5 billion years. Let’s go!

Killing the Demons in a Video Game, calms the Demons in my mind.

The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist.

Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.

Of anything in my life, I would say kids by far make me the happiest.

At SpaceX we specialize in converting things from impossible to late.

Failure is irrelevant unless it is catastrophic.

I have too many ideas, Ideas are relatively easy, execution is hard.

I think there will be 20 billion humanoid robots.

It is not the degree but the skill that achieves success.

At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth.

If you do something like read a lot of books and talk to a lot of people, you can learn almost anything.

I mean, we’re all going to die someday, if you’re going to pick some place to die, then why not Mars?

We don't want to be one of those single-planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species.

Killing the demons in a video game, calms the demons in my mind.

The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.

The Earth can probably take 10x the current civilisation.

A number of these very high priced art things are tax evasion and money laundering.

I only have 0.4 donuts at a time, because my brain neural network quantizes it down to 0 donuts.

Having children is saving the world.

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