122 Powerful Elon Musk Quotes

Elon Musk is a South African entrepreneur who is known for founding Space-X in 2002. He is also the CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors. Space-X launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2012 and Musk became a household name around the world. Elon also co-founded the electronic payment firm called X.com in 1999, which is known as PayPal now. Elon became a multi-millionaire in his late 20s after selling a startup Zip2 to a division of Compaq Computers. Zip2(1995), was his first launched company.

Elon Musk was ranked 25th in World’s most powerful men by Forbes. He is the second richest person after Jeff Bezos with an estimated net worth of US$144.1 billion. However, this position is still up for debate as Musk’s net worth is slowly but surely rising.

Personal Life

Musk was born in 1971, in Pretoria (South Africa). His father was a wealthy engineer. Inventions fanaticized him in his early childhood, and his daydreaming made his parents test his hearing via doctors. He was 10 when his parents got divorced. He developed an interest in programming and at the age of 12, he sold the first game he made called Blastar. Musk was very introvert and bookish and was bullied by fellows till the age of 15.

Musk married twice but both his marriages ended in divorce. He is currently in a relationship with Canadian Musician Grimes.

Elon Musk Empire

Elon Musk owns several companies which include SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, Open AI, and Neuralink. These companies operate in automobile, aerospace, telecommunication, energy, transportation, infrastructure/tunneling, AI, and healthcare.

Let’s go through some of the inspirational quotes by Elon Musk on Innovation and success.

49 Elon Musk Inspiration Quote on Innovation and Success

Elon Musk believed in dreaming big. His quote on innovation and success will make you understand his take on life.

1. “I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”

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

3. “Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.”

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

5. “The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.”

6. “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”

7. “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.”

8. “There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.”

9. “It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.”

10. “Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.”

11. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.”

12. “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.”

13. “A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies.”

14. “People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.”

15. “If you’re co-founder or CEO, you have to do all kinds of tasks you might not want to do… If you don’t do your chores, the company won’t succeed… No task is too menial.”

16. “I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens.”

17. “I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple’s product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.”

18. “I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.”

19. “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.”

20. “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.”

21. “I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.”

22. “I don’t believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that ‘it’s all about the process,’ I see that as a bad sign. The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.”

23. “Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive, and determination of the people behind it as the product they sell.”

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

25. “There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.”

26. “Talent is extremely important. It’s like a sports team, the team that has the best individual player will often win, but then there’s a multiplier from how those players work together and the strategy they employ.”

27. “Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour workweeks and you’re putting in 100 hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.”

28. “I’ve actually not read any books on time management.”

29. “I’m interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you’re like, ‘Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?'”

30. “Really pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it, particularly from friends. … Hardly anyone does that, and it’s incredibly helpful.”

31. “If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.”

32. “What makes innovative thinking happen?… I think it’s really a mindset. You have to decide.”

33. “People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.”

34. “Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.”

35. “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.”

36. “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.”

37. “I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved.”

38. “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.”

39. “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.”

40. “You shouldn’t do things differently just because they’re different. They need to be… better.”

41. “You have to say, ‘Well, why did it succeed where others did not?'”

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

43. “We have a strict ‘no-assholes policy’ at SpaceX.”

44. “I think the best way to attract venture capital is to try and come up with a demonstration of whatever product or service it is and ideally take that as far as you can. Just see if you can sell that to real customers and start generating some momentum. The further along you can get with that, the more likely you are to get funding.”

45. “Disruptive technology where you really have a big technology discontinuity… tends to come from new companies.”

46. “As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies.”

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

48. “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.”

49. “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.”

12 Elon Musk Funny Quotes

While commenting on making Mars warm enough to be hospitable to human Musk says,

1. “The fast way is to drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles.”

   Upon answering the question that Why Tesla office needs roller coaster Musk replies,

2. “Everybody around here has slides in their lobbies. I’m actually wondering about putting in a roller coaster — like a functional roller coaster at the factory in Fremont. You’d get in, and it would take you around [the] factory but also up and down. Who else has a roller coaster? … It would probably be really expensive, but I like the idea of it.”

   When Ford blocked Tesla’s Model E Musk said,

3. “Like why did you go steal Tesla’s E? Like you’re some sort of fascist army marching across the alphabet, some sort of Sesame Street robber?”

4. “So next I went to Russia three times, in late 2001 and 2002, to see if I could negotiate the purchase of two ICBMs [missiles]. Without the nukes, obviously.”

5. ‘Where are the aliens?’ Really odd that we see no sign of them. Btw, please don’t mention the pyramids. Stacking stone blocks is not evidence of an advanced civilization. The rumor that I’m building a spaceship to get back to my home planet Mars is totally untrue. The ancient Egyptians were amazing, but if aliens built the pyramids, they would’ve left behind a computer or something.”

6. Musk almost died because of malaria during his vacations and said “That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: Vacation will kill you.”

7. “My family fears that the Russians will assassinate me.”

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

9. “I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need to find a girlfriend. That’s why I need to carve out just a little more time. I think maybe even another five to 10 — how much time does a woman want a week? Maybe 10 hours? That’s kind of the minimum? I don’t know.”

10. “In the distant future, people may outlaw driving cars because it’s too dangerous. You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.”

11. 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.”

12. “We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China — if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.”

16 Elon Musk Quote on Tesla

1. “As of 2016, the number of American car companies that haven’t gone bankrupt is a grand total of two: Ford and Tesla.”

2. “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.”

3. “We will not stop until every car on the road is electric”

4. “I’m not the biggest proponent of hydrogen… Success is not one of the possible outcomes.”

5. “The only reason they [the big car companies] do fuel cell, they don’t really believe it, it’s like a marketing thing.”

6. “We actually bring the car and we kind of hit it with a pit crew, like a Formula One pit crew.”

7. “I think there are more politicians in favor of electric cars than against.”

8. “You have to match the convenience of the gasoline car in order for people to buy an electric car.”

9. “In order to have clean air in cities, you have to go electric.”

10. “You should not show somebody something very cool and then not do it. At Tesla, any prototype that is shown to customers, the production must be better.”

11. “With the Model 3, a future compact SUV and a new kind of pickup truck, we plan to address most of the consumer market.”

12. “We believe the Tesla Semi will deliver a substantial reduction in the cost of cargo transport, while increasing safety…”

13. “There are two other types of electric vehicle needed: heavy-duty trucks and high passenger-density urban transport.”

14. “The F-150 is the best selling car in America. If people are voting that’s their car, then that’s the car we have to deliver.”

15. “The average speed on the line [at the Tesla Freemont factory] is incredibly slow… Including S & X, it’s maybe 5 cm per second. This is very slow. I’m confident we can get to at least 1 metre per second. So, a 20 fold increase at least. To put that into perspective, 1 metre per second is a slow walk, or at least a medium speed walk, a fast walk would be 1.5 metres per second. And then the fastest humans can run over 10 metres per second. So, if we’re only doing 0.05 metres per second that’s very slow.”

16. “The lithium is two percent of the cell mass [in our batteries]. So it’s like salt in the salad; it’s a very small amount of the cell mass and a fairly small amount of the cost. But it sounds like it’s big because it’s called ‘lithium ion,’ but really, our battery should be called ‘nickel graphite,’ because it’s mostly nickel and graphite.”

6 Elon Musk Quote for entrepreneurs

1. “People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.”

2. “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.”

3. “The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.”

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

5. “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.”

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

5 Elon Musk Quote on AI

Musk has received criticism on his views for Artificial Intelligence (AI). His critics believed that his views on AI should not be taken seriously. Elon thinks that AI will make human existence at stake.

1. “The global arms race for AI will cause World War III”

2. “AI is a greater risk than North Korea”

3. “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”

4. “Governments will force companies to turn over AI tech at gunpoint”

5. “AI will be the best or worst thing ever for humanity.”

34 Elon Musk quote on SpaceX and Mars

1. “I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species than if we’re or not. You want to be inspired by things. You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great. And that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about.”

2. “Falcon 9 lands on a single-engine, and that the final landing is always done with a single engine whereas the with BFR we will always have multi-engine out capability. So if you can get to a very high reliability with even a single engine, and then you can land with either of two engines, I think we can get to a landing reliability that is on par with the safest commercial airliners. So you can essentially count on the landing. You want minimum pucker factor on landing. And it can land with also very high precision. In fact we believe the precision at this point is good enough for propulsive landing that we do not need legs for the next version. It will literally land with so much precision it will land back on its launch mounts.”

3. “The launch rate is increasing exponentially. Particularly when you take tanking or refilling on orbit into account, and taking the idea of establishing a self-sustaining base on Mars or the moon or elsewhere seriously, you need ultimately thousands of ships and tens of thousands of retanking or refilling operations, which means you need many launches per day. In terms of how many landings are occurring, you need to be looking at your watch, not your calendar.”

4. “Dragon 2 will directly dock with the Space Station, and it can do so with zero human intervention. You just press ‘go’ and it will dock.”

5. “We [SpaceX] started off with just a few people who really didn’t know how to make rockets. And the reason that I ended up being the chief engineer or chief designer, was not because I want to, it’s because I couldn’t hire anyone. Nobody good would join. So I ended up being that by default. And I messed up the first three launches.”

6. “[With the BFR] you’ve got the engine section in the rear, the propellant tanks in the middle, and then a large payload bay in the front. And that payload bay is actually eight stories tall. In fact, you can fit a whole stack of Falcon 1 rockets in the payload bay.”

7. “There is a small delta wing at the back of the rocket. The reason for that is in order to expand the mission envelope of the BFR spaceship. Depending on whether you’re landing or you’re entering a planet or a moon that has no atmosphere, a thin atmosphere, or a dense atmosphere, and depending on whether you’re re-entering with no payload in the front, a small payload, or a heavy payload, you have to balance the rocket out as it’s coming in. And so the delta wing at the back, which also includes a split flap for pitch and roll control, allows us to control the pitch angle despite having a wide range of payloads in the nose and a wide range of atmospheric densities. So we tried to avoid having the delta wing, but it was necessary in order to generalize the capability of the spaceship such that it could land anywhere in the solar system.”

8. “If we can build a system that cannibalizes our own products, makes our own products redundant, then all of the resources, which are quite enormous, that are used for Falcon 9, Heavy, and Dragon, can be applied to one system. Some of our customers are conservative and they want to see BFR fly several times before they’re comfortable launching on it, so what we plan to do is to build ahead and have a stock of Falcon 9 and Dragon vehicles so that customers can be comfortable. If they want to use the old rocket, the old spacecraft, they can do that, because we’ll have a bunch in stock, but all of our resources will then turn towards building BFR, and we believe that we can do this with the revenue we receive for launching satellites and for servicing the Space Station.”

9. “The size of this [BFR] being a 9 meter diameter vehicle is a huge enabler for new satellites. We can actually send something that is almost nine meters in diameter to orbit. So for example, if you want to do a new Hubble, you could send a mirror that has ten times the surface area of the current Hubble, as a single unit. Doesn’t have to unfold or anything. Or you can send a large number of small satellites. You do whatever you like.”

10. “Sometimes I get some sort of criticism for why are you using combustion and rockets and you have electric cars. Well there isn’t some way to make an electric rocket. I wish there was. But in the long term you can use solar power to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, combine it with water, and produce fuel and oxygen for the rocket. So the same thing that we’re [going to do] doing on Mars, we could do on Earth in the long-term.”

11. “In 2024 we want to try to fly four ships [to Mars]. Two cargo and two crew. The goal of these initial missions is to find the best source of water, that’s for the first mission, and then the second mission, the goal is to build the propellant plant. So we should, particular with six ships there, have plenty of landed mass to construct the propellant depot, which will consist of a large array of solar panels, a very large array, and then everything necessary to mine and refine water, and then draw the CO2 out of the atmosphere, and then create and store deep-cryo CH4 and O2.”

12. “When starting SpaceX I thought the odds of success were less than 10%, and I just accepted that I would probably just lose everything. But that maybe we would make some progress. If we could just move the ball forward, even if we died some other company could pick up the baton and keep moving it forward. So that would still do some good.” (Sep, 2016 | Source)

13. “Oddly enough, I actually think the odds [of a Mars colony] are pretty good. At this point I am certain there is a way. I’m certain success is one of the possible outcomes for establishing a self sustaining Mars colony, in fact a growing Mars colony. I’m certain that it’s possible. Whereas until maybe a few years ago I was unsure whether success was even one of the possible outcomes.”

14. “In terms of people going to Mars, I think this is potentially something that could be accomplished in about 10 years, maybe sooner, maybe 9 years. I need to make sure SpaceX doesn’t die between now and then, and that I don’t die. Or if I do die, that someone takes over who will continue that.”

15. “It [the ISS] seems really still, but it’s moving really, really fast. To put that into perspective, a bullet from a .45 handgun is just below the speed of sound, so the Space Station is going more than 25 times faster than that. And that’s what’s needed, actually, to go up and stay up. That’s why there’s the term escape velocity, not escape altitude. There’s no such thing as an escape altitude. There’s only escape velocity.”

16. “You can think of gravity as kind of a funnel in spacetime. Think about it like a coin funnel. It’s very much like that, but it’s obviously a sort of four dimensional coin funnel. If you spin a marble or a coin on a coin funnel, when it’s far out it spins slowly and as it gets closer it spins faster and faster. If you were to start at the bottom of the coin funnel and wanted to exit, you’d spin it horizontally and it would spin out. And that’s really how you get to orbit. Gravity is like a funnel.”

17. “In order to get to orbit, all that matters is your horizontal velocity. Your altitude doesn’t really matter. In fact the force of gravity at the nominal boundary of space, 100 kilometers, is almost exactly the same as it is on the surface of the Earth. It’s a few percent lower than on the surface of the Earth. In order to go up and stay up the only thing that matters is how fast you are going horizontal to the Earth’s surface. So you have that outward radial acceleration, or think about it like tetherball or something like that. It’s really that outward accelerate is the thing that matters.”

18. “I think that when I say multi-planet species, that’s what we really want to be. It’s not like still being a single-planet species by moving planets. It’s really being a multi-planet species and having civilization and life as we know it extend beyond Earth to the rest of the Solar System, and ultimately to other star systems. That’s the future that’s exciting and expiring and I that’s what, you know, you need things like that to be glad to wake up in the morning. Life can’t be just about solving problems. There have to be things that are exciting and inspiring that make you glad to be alive.”

19. “I think if you’re going to choose a place to die, then Mars is probably, you know, not a bad choice… It’s not some sort of Martian death wish, or something. But, yeah, if you’re going to born on Earth, die on Mars, sounds pretty good.”

20. “SpaceX is only 12 years old now [as of 2014]. Between now and 2040, the company’s lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.” “If the objective was to achieve the best risk adjusted return, starting a rocket company is insane. But that was not my objective. I had certainly come to the conclusion that if something didn’t happen to improve rocket technology we would be stuck on earth forever. And the big aerospace companies had no interest in radical innovation. All they wanted to do was make their old technology slightly better every year, and sometimes it would actually get worse.”

21. “There needs to be an intersection of the set of people who wish to go [to Mars], and the set of people who can afford to go. And that intersection of sets has to be enough to establish a self-sustaining civilisation. My rough guess is that for a half-million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go. But it’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies.”

22. “Even at a million [people living on Mars], you’re really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars. You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.”

23. “I’d like to go [to mars], but if there is a high risk of death, I wouldn’t want to put the company in jeopardy. I only want to go when I could be confident that my death wouldn’t result in the primary mission of the company falling away.”

24. “Rockets are the only form of transportation on Earth where the vehicle is built anew for each journey. What if you had to build a new plane for every flight?”

25. “What I’m trying to do is to make a significant difference in space flight and help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.”

26. “All modes of transport will be fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets. There’s no way around Newton’s 3rd law.” “The fast way [to warm mars] is to drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles.”

27. “I Would Like to Die on Mars, Just Not on Impact.”

28. “I’m talking about sending ultimately tens of thousands, eventually millions of people to Mars and then going out there and exploring the stars.”

29. “We have a strict ‘no-assholes policy’ at SpaceX.”

30. “We’ll go to the moons of Jupiter, at least some of the outer ones for sure, and probably Titan on Saturn, and the asteroids. Once we have that forcing function, and an Earth-to-Mars economy, we’ll cover the whole Solar System. But the key is that we have to make the Mars thing work. 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. That’s the next step.”

31. “I’m not saying I’m skeptical of [traveling to] the stars. I just wonder what humanity will even look like when we try to do that. If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonise the whole Solar System, because we’ll have created a strong economic forcing function for the improvement of space travel.”

32. “It’s pretty hard to get to another star system. Alpha Centauri is four light years away, so if you go at 10 per cent of the speed of light, it’s going to take you 40 years, and that’s assuming you can instantly reach that speed, which isn’t going to be the case. You have to accelerate. You have to build up to 20 or 30 per cent and then slow down, assuming you want to stay at Alpha Centauri and not go zipping past.”

33. “The Soviets were crowing after Sputnik, about how they had better technology than we did, and so therefore communism is better. And so we set a really tough target and said we would beat them there, and money was no object. But once the ideological battle was won, the impetus went away, and money very quickly became an object.”

34. “It’s obvious that space is deeply ingrained in the American psyche.”

10 Best Elon Musk Quotes Images in 2022

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Summary

Elon Musk is a tech billionaire and all his inventions are based on advancements of technology. His biography and quote would let you peek into the mind of the genius. His life and achievements are a spur for entrepreneurs.

Which project of Elon Musk excites you most and which is your favorite quote by Elon Musk?