Elon Musk Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

Elon Musk
If you wanted to be close to the cutting edge, particularly in technology, you came to North America.

Elon Musk
Tuition costs are outrageous. Fortunately, they gave me a scholarship…so I only had to cover living expenses, books, etc., by working.

Elon Musk
We are used to things improving every year; we are used to having a better cell phone next year than this year; a better lap top. We are even used to some basic things, like we expect more from your car in next year's model than last year's model. But this is not the case in space; reliability and cost - those are the fundamental parameters of transportation - have not improved.

Elon Musk
I want to be able to make sure that we have enough capital to survive at least three consecutive failures. If you want to make a small fortune in the launch vehicle business, start with a large one.

Elon Musk
I didn't really expect to make any money. If I could make enough to cover the rent and buy some food that would be fine. As it turns out, it turned out to be quite valuable in the end.

Elon Musk
I like to be involved in things that change the world. The Internet did, and space will probably be more responsible for changing the world than anything else. If humanity can expand beyond the Earth, obviously that's where the future is.

Elon Musk
We got to the moon, but have never done anything better since. I'm disappointed that we have not made more progress since Apollo. I don't even see a plan that says we're going to do better than Apollo to exceed that goal.

Elon Musk
I think that is a mistake and results in cloudy judgment on important technical issues. They can't tell if something is really good or not, so they just do what everyone else does, assuming it to be the safe bet.

Elon Musk
There is nothing inherently expensive about rockets. It's just that those who have built and operated them in the past have done so with horrendously poor efficiency.

Elon Musk
Imagine creating a huge software program that can only be tested in little pieces on a computer that is slightly different from what it is supposed to run on. However, when you do run it as a whole on the actual computer for the first time, it must run almost flawlessly without a single significant bug. When is the last time you saw a software program do that?

Elon Musk
The long term ultimate objective – the holy grail – is we would like to help make life multi-planetary.

Elon Musk
I think 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.

Elon Musk
Well, I have tried to learn as much as possible from prior attempts.

Elon Musk
When thinking about starting a business, I think it's actually better to start in a trough and come to market in a peak, than the other way around. Frankly, if anything does, and it's almost cliché, space has a long-term future.

Elon Musk
If nothing else, we are committed to failing in a new way.

Elon Musk
There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation.
Explaining what will happen when robots take people's jobs.

Elon Musk
There will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you wanted to have a job for personal satisfaction. But the AI would be able to do everything [...] One of the challenges in the future will be how do we find meaning in life.

Elon Musk
The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I'm not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast [...] Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast — it is growing at a pace close to exponential.

Elon Musk
Kamala [Harris] is quite literally a communist. She wants not merely equal opportunity, but equal outcomes.

Elon Musk
If we can build something that is capable of taking people and equipment to Mars, such that it can service a transportation infrastructure for humanity becoming a multi- planet species - which I think is a very, very important objective - then I would consider the mission of SpaceX successful, at that point.

Elon Musk
A great deal of bargaining power with suppliers. We are never locked in to anyone.

Elon Musk
There's a graveyard of prior attempts, a big graveyard. There's probably some freshly dug graves just waiting to be filled. Our aspiration is to avoid that destination.

Elon Musk
We're adding a triple sign-off for all work done on the launch pad, on flight components, and flight critical GSE. You have a technician, a responsible engineer, and then quality assurance will sign the final, record all information, and take photographs of all the work that was done, and then make sure that all information is put into our quality assurance database, which is reviewed prior to launch.

Elon Musk
Falcon One is going to be the lowest cost per flight to orbit of any production rocket.

Elon Musk
So even if a fire develops, it can't really attack the particularly vulnerable locations like the pneumatic system or the avionics or the engine bay. We want to be in the situation that even if a fire develops, the rocket just keeps going.

Elon Musk
Which means we're cheaper than the Chinese, cheaper than [the] Russians or anywhere else – and we're doing it in the United States with American labour costs.

Elon Musk
Although I am new in the business, my team is not. I would say that, person for person, there has never been a better rocket company in existence, in history. I don't think there has ever been a group this talented in one place, in one company, developing a rocket – ever.
If you have millions of dollars it changes your lifestyle, and anyone who says differently is talking bullshit. I don't need to work, from a standard of living point of view, but I do, you know. I work every day and on weekends and I haven't taken a vacation for years.

Elon Musk
I don't have an issue with serving in the military per se, but serving in the South African army suppressing black people just didn't seem like a really good way to spend time.

Elon Musk
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.

Elon Musk