Top 100 Elon Quotes
#1. He does what he wants, and he is relentless about it. It's Elon's world, and the rest of us live in it.
Ashlee Vance
#2. Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently,
Steve Wozniak
#3. If I were to point to the person who's having the greatest impact ... I'd point to Elon Musk.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#4. No one has any idea what's going to happen. Not even Elon Musk. That's why he's building those rockets. He wants a 'Plan B' on another world.
Stephen Colbert
#5. Elon came to the conclusion early in his career that life is short that if you really embrace this, it leaves you with the obvious conclusion that you should be working as hard as you can.
Ashlee Vance
#6. Space X's Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars with modules where earthlings can live. My teleporting technology is the number one way those individuals will get new information, new treatments of diseases that will occur on the planet, and new food sources.
Craig Venter
#7. He sent the housekeepers away and had Elon do all the chores to let him know what it was like "to play American.
Ashlee Vance
#8. This question came from Elon Musk near the very end of a long dinner we shared at a high-end seafood restaurant in Silicon Valley. I'd gotten to the restaurant first
Ashlee Vance
#9. You almost wish that Bill and Steve had a genetically engineered love child and, who knows, maybe we should genotype Elon to see if that's what happened.
Ashlee Vance
#11. When one of them complained of being frightened by the dark, Elon pointed out that "dark is merely the absence of light," which did little to reassure the scared child.
Ashlee Vance
#12. I'm personally a moderate and a registered independent, so I'm not strongly Democratic or strongly Republican.
Elon Musk
#13. Some people don't like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.
Elon Musk
#14. In order for us to have a future that's exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we're a space-bearing civilization.
Elon Musk
#15. I realized that a methane-oxygen rocket engine could achieve a specific impulse greater than 380.
Elon Musk
#16. I wouldn't say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I'd like my fear emotion to be less because it's very distracting and fries my nervous system.
Elon Musk
#17. If something's important enough, you should try. Even if you - the probable outcome is failure.
Elon Musk
#18. I've actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don't mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.
Elon Musk
#19. I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful ... With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon.
Elon Musk
#20. If you had to buy a new plane every time you flew somewhere, it would be incredibly expensive.
Elon Musk
#21. When we got Tesla going at the very beginning, if you asked me what I thought the odds of success were, I would have said less than 50%. I would have said that failure is the most likely outcome.
Elon Musk
#22. I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.
Elon Musk
#23. Many things are improbable, only a few are impossible.
Elon Musk
#24. I'd like to dial it back 5% or 10% and try to have a vacation that's not just e-mail with a view.
Elon Musk
#25. I could go and buy one of the islands in the
Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and
create a new company.
Elon Musk
#26. Going from PayPal, I thought: 'Well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?' Not from the perspective, 'What's the best way to make money?'
Elon Musk
#27. I feel that we should try and understand how we as women storytellers have often fallen into the mode of telling stories in the ways in which traditionally men would. I often find that my points of view are expressed by male characters.
Danae Elon
#28. They are mostly Americans and almost all are Protestant. Many have a strong grounding in the Bible. In Jerusalem, they suddenly take off their clothes or shout prophecies on street corners, only to revert to normal after a few days' treatment.
Amos Elon
#29. When you struggle with a problem, that's when you understand it.
Elon Musk
#30. Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.
Elon Musk
#31. 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.
Elon Musk
#32. I hate writing about personal stuff. I don't have a Facebook page. I don't use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don't use them.
Elon Musk
#33. Hindsight is not necessarily the best guide to understanding what really happened. The past is often as distorted by hindsight as it is clarified by it.
Amos Elon
#34. Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That's pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.
Elon Musk
#35. 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.
Elon Musk
#36. Winning 'Motor Trend' Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.
Elon Musk
#37. 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.
Elon Musk
#38. The U.S. automotive industry has been selling cars the same way for over 100 years, and there are many laws in place to govern exactly how that is to be accomplished.
Elon Musk
#39. Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.
Elon Musk
#40. 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.
Elon Musk
#41. I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.
Elon Musk
#42. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes,
Elon Musk
#43. Jerusalem has been - and for many, still is - a metaphor for destruction and the vengeance of an offended God. She is the city where believers have killed unbelievers to give life to faith.
Amos Elon
#44. It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.
Elon Musk
#45. There's a fundamental difference, if you look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilisation, that's out there exploring the stars ... compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.
Elon Musk
#46. I don't think very highly of Henrik Fisker. [ ... H]e thinks the reason we don't have electric cars is for lack of styling
Elon Musk
#47. You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.
Elon Musk
#48. It's really incumbent upon us as life's agents to extend life to another planet. I think that being a multi-planet species will significantly increase the richness and scope of the human experience.
Elon Musk
#49. Stationary storage will be as big as the car business long term. The growth rate will probably be several times what it is for the car business.
Elon Musk
#50. If we're going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.
Elon Musk
#51. 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.
Elon Musk
#52. It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.
Elon Musk
#53. And we need things in life that are exciting and inspiring. It can't just be about solving some awful problem. There have to be reasons to get up in the morning.
Elon Musk
#54. One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree - make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.
Elon Musk
#55. Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.
Elon Musk
#56. A Prius is not a true hybrid, really. The current Prius is, like, 2 percent electric. It's a gasoline car with slightly better mileage.
Elon Musk
#57. When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
Elon Musk
#58. I always see what's ... wrong. Would you want that? When I see a car or a rocket or spacecraft, I only see what's wrong. I never see what's right. It's not a recipe for happiness.
Elon Musk
#59. We could definitely make a flying car - but that's not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that's super safe and quiet? Because if it's a howler, you're going to make people very unhappy.
Elon Musk
#60. SpaceX has the potential of saving the U.S. government $1 billion a year. We are opposed to creating an entrenched monopoly with no realistic means for anyone to compete.
Elon Musk
#61. The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far - the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.
Elon Musk
#62. I usually describe myself as an engineer; that's basically what I've been doing since I was a kid.
Elon Musk
#63. Physics is a good framework for thinking ... Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.
Elon Musk
#64. I'm trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.
Elon Musk
#65. If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it's always expensive.
Elon Musk
#66. Life is too short for long-term grudges.
Elon Musk
#67. If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.
Elon Musk
#68. Mars is the only place in the solar system where it's possible for life to become multi-planetarian.
Elon Musk
#69. People should pursue what they're passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.
Elon Musk
#70. I would like to find a more precise way to not only tell the stories of female characters, but also do so in a female "way." My biggest advice would be to trust yourself.
Danae Elon
#71. People will buy the car just because it's a great car. We want them to think it's excellent value for money and then, oh yeah, it happens to be electric.
Elon Musk
#72. My family fears that the Russians will assassinate me.
Elon Musk
#73. I'm a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.
Elon Musk
#74. Government isn't that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you've got to have commercial companies do it.
Elon Musk
#75. You can just reload, propel it and fly again. This is extremely important for revolutionizing access to space because as long as we continue to throw away rockets and space crafts, we will never truly have access to space.
Elon Musk
#76. My opinion is it's a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.
Elon Musk
#77. You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.
Elon Musk
#78. It's just mind-blowingly awesome. I apologize, and I wish I was more articulate, but it's hard to be articulate when your mind's blown-but in a very good way.
Elon Musk
#79. You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that's wrong with it and fix it.
Elon Musk
#80. The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.
Elon Musk
#81. I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.
Elon Musk
#82. A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery.
Elon Musk
#83. I'm nauseatingly pro-American. I would have come here from any country. The U.S. is where great things are possible.
Elon Musk
#84. My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment - my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.
Elon Musk
#85. We polled Tesla owners, do you want autopilot disabled or not. Not one person wanted it disabled. That's pretty telling.
Elon Musk
#86. Democracies are notorious for a tendency to obey the feelings rather than the mind; thus the nature of democracies often makes itdifficult to conclude a peace after a hard-won war. Generous victors are rare.
Amos Elon
#87. Target launch date for Falcon I maiden flight is Halloween(October 31) from our island launch complex in the Kwajalein Atoll. For potential customers out there, I should mention that Kwajalein has some of the worlds best scuba diving and snorkeling! It is literally a tropical paradise.
Elon Musk
#88. The idea of lying on a beach as my main thing just sounds like the worst. It sounds horrible to me. I would go bonkers. I would have to be on serious drugs. I'd be super-duper bored. I like high intensity.
Elon Musk
#89. 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
#90. Humans need to be a multiplanet species.
Elon Musk
#91. I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.
Elon Musk
#92. As a child I would just question things ...
Elon Musk
#93. I'm reasonably optimistic about the future, especially the future of the United States - for the century, at least.
Elon Musk
#94. A utility can handle up to 20% of production from solar and that helps the grid because it produces electricity when needed. Solar power peaks in the middle of the day and that's also when air conditioning is running and businesses are operating, so power production matches usage.
Elon Musk
#95. I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.
Elon Musk
#96. Most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying.
Elon Musk
#97. The primary means of energy generation is going to solar. It will at least be a plurality, and probably be a slight majority in the long term.
Elon Musk
#98. I'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power, and most likely a majority ... in less than 20 years.
Elon Musk
#99. I'm increasingly inclined to think there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish.
Elon Musk
#100. It is theoretically possible to warp spacetime itself, so you're not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but it's actually space that's moving.
Elon Musk
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