Elon Musk

I think people can choose to be not ordinary.
– Elon Musk

I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.
– Elon Musk

It is our destiny to go beyond our planet and develop sustainable environments elsewhere.
– Elon Musk

I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.
– Elon Musk

Don’t be afraid of new arenas.
– Elon Musk

Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive, and determination of the people behind it as the product they sell.
– Elon Musk

The fastest way to make a small fortune in the aerospace industry is to start with a large one.
– Elon Musk

Sooner or later we must expand life beyond this green and blue ball or go extinct.
– Elon Musk

I do wanna go to space – and eventually it would be really cool if I could go to Mars.
– Elon Musk

The lens of history is a good way to filter more versus less important things.
– Elon Musk

The Tesla Roadster… it’s a two-seater sports car, very high performance… In fact, it’s beat any Ferrari or Aston Martin in acceleration. And it has more than twice the energy efficiency of a Prius.
– Elon Musk

As Edison said, “It’s one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.”
– Elon Musk

Disruptive technology where you really have a big technology discontinuity… tends to come from new companies.
– Elon Musk

My motivation for all my companies has been to be involved in something that I thought would have a significant impact on the world.
– Elon Musk

As far as new companies go, the car business is such a capital intensive business. It doesn’t lend itself to start-ups very well. You need to operate with incredible capital efficiency if you are going to be start-up and succeed in the car business.
– Elon Musk

As you might imagine, when somebody tries to build an orbital launch vehicle which is not really all that distinguishable from an ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missile], there’s a lot of regulation. And there probably should be, because you don’t want to launch something and end up hitting LA, where I live…
– Elon Musk

Given the choice, I’d rather stick a fork in my hand than write about my personal life.
– Elon Musk

You shouldn’t do things differently just because they’re different. They need to be… better.
– Elon Musk

When you try new things, you try this idea, that idea… well, a large number of them are not gonna work… and that has to be ok. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you’re not gonna get people coming up with ideas.
– Elon Musk

We ultimately want to be the company that makes a difference in extension of life beyond Earth – which is one of the most important things that life itself could achieve.
– Elon Musk

You have to stay grounded in the short term, cause if you don’t do things that pay the bills, you’re not gonna achieve the ultimate launch and objective. But it’s nice to have that sort of Holy Grail – long-term potential out there as an inspiration for coming to work.
– Elon Musk

There’s a big leap between making that first prototype and actually manufacturing it in a large quantity.
– Elon Musk

You know early in life, I did lots of risky things when I didn’t have that much that was depending on me. Now, I have to be more cautious about risky things.
– Elon Musk

It is easy to get somewhat blasé about a rocket factory if you’re here every day.
– Elon Musk

I have to sort of bring myself back, think about the big picture and remind myself that this is, actually, pretty cool, unusual stuff.
– Elon Musk

I’m a big believer in us becoming a space exploring civilization and, ultimately, extending life beyond earth.
– Elon Musk

When I was in college I tried to think what are the really big problems that face the world, that, which will most affect the future of humanity? And the three that I thought were the most important were the Internet, transition to a sustainable energy economy, and the third was space exploration, in particular, making life multi-planetary.
– Elon Musk

I was sort of forced to choose. You know, it’s either start the grad program or… do my Internet company.
– Elon Musk

It seemed to me like humanity was acquiring a nervous system.
– Elon Musk

I taught myself how to program computers when I was a kid. And bought my first computer when I was ten and sold my first commercial program when I was 12.
– Elon Musk

My first company was not a consumer company. It was primarily providing Internet software to media companies to enable them to go online.
– Elon Musk

The second company, Paypal, started off, originally, as EX.com. And then about a year after that the company merged with another company called Confinity.
– Elon Musk

Whenever we demonstrated the system to people, they wouldn’t get excited about the aggregation of financial services. But they got really wowed by the fact that you could e-mail to somebody. And we were, like, ‘Wow, okay, that’s the easy part.’ But we started focusing on that.
– Elon Musk

Initially the company was known as EX.com. And then we used PayPal as the consumer brand. And then about a year after the merge, we changed the company’s name from EX.com to PayPal to match the name of the product.
– Elon Musk

You have to say, “Well, why did it succeed where others did not?”
– Elon Musk

We figured out a way to authenticate bank accounts. So normally it’s really hard to authenticate bank accounts from the standpoint of pulling money from someone’s bank account ‘cause you can give us a bank account number.
– Elon Musk

We figured out how to authenticate a bank account without anyone even seeing you.
– Elon Musk

When somebody has a breakthrough innovation, it is rarely one little thing. Very rarely, is it one little thing. It’s usually a whole bunch of things that collectively amount to a huge innovation.
– Elon Musk

Innovation is a collection of complex things that are usually difficult to convey so there is some sound byte that’s given.
– Elon Musk

I would just question things… It would infuriate my parents… That I wouldn’t just believe them when they said something ‘cause I’d ask them why. And then I’d consider whether that response made sense given everything else I knew.
– Elon Musk

We sold PayPal to Ebay for about a billion and a half.
– Elon Musk

I think there’s… plenty of public will for space exploration particularly in the United States which is a nation of explorers.
– Elon Musk

The long term vision is to help make life multi-planetary.
– Elon Musk

Boeing and Lockheed are the two biggest contractors to NASA. So when you see a rocket getting launched it is either a Boeing, or a Rocky, Lockheed Rocket, typically. NASA does not build the rockets. But NASA will contract with the aerospace companies…
– Elon Musk

No one has ever developed a fully developed, a fully reusable orbital transportation system.
– Elon Musk

What are the most important elements in the history of life itself?
– Elon Musk

I funded the company and worked with those three guys to develop the Tesla Roadster.
– Elon Musk

The Roadster is more than twice as good as a Prius. But it’s $100,000. And the reason is because new technology takes time to optimize.
– Elon Musk

How do you like this proposition? You put no money down, and your electricity bill goes down?… So they’re growing like gang busters.
– Elon Musk

Right now I’m probably 60 percent SpaceX, 35 percent Tesla, and five percent Solar City and everything else.
– Elon Musk

Laws can be broken where you can find some corner case in a very unusual circumstance that will break it.
– Elon Musk

Getting the right people is extremely important. And I actually interview everyone at SpaceX personally. And we’re a 500 person company. So that’s a lot of interviews.
– Elon Musk

It’s very important to like the people you work with, otherwise life [and] your job is gonna be quite miserable.
– Elon Musk

We have a strict “no-assholes policy” at SpaceX.
– Elon Musk

If your boss is an awful person, you’re gonna hate coming to work.
– Elon Musk

I think the United States is more open to new ideas than any country in the world. And I think becomes somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that because the United States is open to new ideas, it attracted people from the world who had new ideas.
– Elon Musk

It’s filled with people who like new ideas. And who aren’t bound by history.
– Elon Musk

A lot of the countries that have been around for a long time are really trapped in their own history.
– Elon Musk

I think Edison was certainly a role model probably one of the biggest role models.
– Elon Musk

I’m a bigger fan of Edison than Tesla because Edison brought his stuff to market and made those inventions accessible to the world, whereas Tesla didn’t really do that.
– Elon Musk

I actually thought Walt Disney was a pretty good innovator. I like Disney…
– Elon Musk

It’s very important that SpaceX is profitable, or we’ll not be able to earn the money necessary to continue future developments…
– Elon Musk

What makes innovative thinking happen?… I think it’s really a mindset. You have to decide.
– Elon Musk

Just showing up is half the battle. You gotta try hard to do it, and don’t be afraid of failure.
– Elon Musk

You also need to be rooted in reality. It’s easy to get high on your own supply.
– Elon Musk

Don’t delude yourself into thinking something’s working when it’s not, or you’re gonna get fixated on a bad solution.
– Elon Musk

Sometimes the customer doesn’t actually know what they need.
– Elon Musk

As a huge fan of the popular computer game ‘Space Invaders,’ I taught myself how to write computer code and designed my own game called ‘Blast Star’ at the age of 12. I later sold the code to a computer magazine for $500, which back then was a lot of money for a young boy.
– Elon Musk

It has always been my belief that it is our destiny to go beyond our planet and develop sustainable environments elsewhere.
– Elon Musk

I was disappointed with the lack of innovation in the field of space exploration since man first landed on the moon almost 34 years ago. I figured that if I wanted to go to space and help us in the quest for other planets, I was better off building my own rocket. In the summer of 2002, I founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX)…
– Elon Musk

The private sector is very good at organization and innovation.
– Elon Musk

If something has to be designed and invented, and you have to figure out how to ensure that the value of the thing you create is greater than the cost of the inputs, then that is probably my core skill.
– Elon Musk

The whole purpose behind Tesla, the reason I put so much of my time and money into helping create the business, is we want to be a catalyst for accelerating the electric car revolution.
– Elon Musk

A good electric motor such as the one that we have in the Tesla roadster is about 90 percent efficient at turning electricity into motion, whereas a gasoline internal combustion is somewhere in the range of around 17 to 18 percent. Most of what it does is generate heat.
– Elon Musk

If you look at the pace of battery improvement, it is clear that it is inevitable. The future will be entirely electric.
– Elon Musk

I try not to be controversial.
– Elon Musk

I think it is a good idea to have affordable cars.
– Elon Musk

If any new technology is expensive when it starts out, and you can point to pretty much anything, and because the first thing that the engineers are trying to do is make it work. And when you make it work then you optimize and you optimize and optimize.
– Elon Musk

If you want a high performance car with a clean conscience, this is the only option.
– Elon Musk

When I started the company, nobody was putting any money into the Internet. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure if I’d be able to pay the rent. But as it turned out, the Internet was pretty huge.
– Elon Musk

There is an extreme lack of innovation in… large industries. I saw it as an opportunity.
– Elon Musk

I need to be protected against a private equity firm or hedge fund trying to force me to maximize profitability rather than affecting the future of humanity in a positive way. That’s why I have to have a controlling stake, or close to one, in all of my ventures.
– Elon Musk

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.
– Elon Musk

The U.S. is where great things are possible.
– Elon Musk

It’s important to tell people why someone was fired. Otherwise, they may think that it was a random decision and not based on merit.
– Elon Musk

As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies.
– Elon Musk

At my companies, our position is that we hire someone in spite of an MBA, not because of one.
– Elon Musk

Founders should run the company for as long as they reasonably can. You should only consider passing over the reins to somebody as good or better than you are at creating great products.
– Elon Musk

I don’t care if I’m arming my competitors: I just want more electric cars on the road.
– Elon Musk

You can’t only look at what an individual employee gets done. You also have to look at how they’ve helped people around them get things done.
– Elon Musk

One of the most important things that I think will be invented this century, hopefully by SpaceX, is the first fully reusable orbital rocket. It’s the fundamental invention necessary for humanity to expand to the stars and to become multiplanetary.
– Elon Musk

I wanted to be involved in something that would matter to the world and be important to the future of humanity.
– Elon Musk

We want to be the Southwest Airlines of space launches. They offer flights for a heck of a lot less, have a strong safety record, and are on time.
– Elon Musk

I can totally see every car on the road being electric. We will not stop.
– Elon Musk

Sometimes the media tries to create a more antagonistic position than is really the case…
– Elon Musk

The reason I created Tesla… is to serve as a catalyst for a transition to electric vehicles.
– Elon Musk

The strategy of Tesla has always been to start with a low volume high priced car, then a medium volume medium priced car and then a low priced high volume car.
– Elon Musk

We’re on the verge now on delivering the four door sedan – the Model S
– Elon Musk

NASA selected us to take over the cargo transportation function of the space shuttle… We build the whole rocket from scratch, in California actually.
– Elon Musk

We’re already sold out of next years production… We will produce about 20,000 units a year.
– Elon Musk

Find a way or make a way to get something done.
– Elon Musk