1. One of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask. Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy.

- Elon Musk

2. 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

3. It’s obviously tricky to convert cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.

- Elon Musk

4. Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.

- Elon Musk

5. Every mode of transport that we use – whether it’s planes, trains, automobiles, bikes, horses – is reusable, but not rockets. So we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization.

- Elon Musk

6. 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

7. Life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems. It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

- Elon Musk

8. The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication.

- Elon Musk

9. When I was a child, there’s one thing I said: ‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say.

- Elon Musk

10. One of the biggest mistakes we made was trying to automate things that are super easy for a person to do, but super hard for a robot to do.

- Elon Musk

11. Some companies out there quote a start of production that is substantially in advance of when customers get their cars.

- Elon Musk

12. 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

13. I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future.

- Elon Musk

14. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.

- Elon Musk

15. If you had to buy a new plane every time you flew somewhere, it would be incredibly expensive.

- Elon Musk

16. Education is basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain.

- Elon Musk

17. Also, I want to be clear that a flamethrower is a super terrible idea. Definitely don’t buy one. Unless you like fun.

- Elon Musk

18. Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It’s hard to break into a network once it’s formed.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

20. It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don’t think it’s possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.

- Elon Musk

21. I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

- Elon Musk

22. If you go 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.

- Elon Musk

23. 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

24. Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

- Elon Musk

25. Humans need to be a multiplanet species.

- Elon Musk

26. 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

27. The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.

- Elon Musk

28. For all the supporters of Tesla over the years, and it’s been several years now and there have been some very tough times, I’d just like to say thank you very much. I deeply appreciate the support, particularly through the darkest times.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

30. If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

32. 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

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

- Elon Musk

34. It is remarkable how many things you can explode. I’m lucky I have all my fingers.

- Elon Musk

35. Most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying.

- Elon Musk

36. 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

37. 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

38. The thing that’s worth doing is trying to improve our understanding of the world and gain a better appreciation of the universe and not to worry too much about there being no meaning. And, you know, try and enjoy yourself. Because, actually, life’s pretty good. It really is.

- Elon Musk

39. 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.

- Elon Musk

40. 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

41. I take the position that I’m always to some degree wrong, and the aspiration is to be less wrong.

- Elon Musk

42. Life is too short for long-term grudges.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

44. Stormy weather in Shortville ...

- Elon Musk

45. Great companies are built on great products.

- Elon Musk

46. If you buy a ticket to hell, it isn’t fair to blame hell.

- Elon Musk

47. 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.

- Elon Musk

48. I’m personally a moderate and a registered independent, so I’m not strongly Democratic or strongly Republican.

- Elon Musk

49. With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.

- Elon Musk

50. I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.

- Elon Musk

51. 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

52. I’m glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That’s cool.

- Elon Musk

53. When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.

- Elon Musk

54. You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.

- Elon Musk

55. Whatever area that you get into, given that, even if you’re the best of the best, there’s always a chance of failure. So, I think it’s important that you really like whatever you’re doing. If you don’t like it, life is too short. And also, if you like what you are doing, you think about it even when you are not working. It’s something your mind drawn to. And if you don’t like it, you just really can’t make it work I think.

- Elon Musk

56. Actively seek out and listen carefully to negative feedback.

- Elon Musk

57. The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.

- Elon Musk

58. I want to make rockets 100 times, if not 1,000 times better. The ultimate objective is to make humanity a multiplanet species. Thirty years from now, there’ll be a base on the moon and on Mars, and people will be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

60. If heat death of the universe is the destination, it really is all about the journey.

- Elon Musk

61. 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

62. The rumor that I'm secretly creating a zombie apocalypse to generate demand for flamethrowers is completely false.

- Elon Musk

63. Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

- Elon Musk

64. The Tesla Semi will tug the diesel semi uphill.

- Elon Musk

65. At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.

- Elon Musk

66. The Boring Company flamethrower guaranteed to liven up any party!

- Elon Musk

67. 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

68. There’s a real opportunity to have a vertical takeoff and landing electric supersonic jet.

- Elon Musk

69. 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.

- Elon Musk

70. 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

71. I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

- Elon Musk

72. Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.

- Elon Musk

73. In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.

- Elon Musk

74. I think there are more politicians in favor of electric cars than against. There are still some that are against, and I think the reasoning for that varies depending on the person, but in some cases, they just don’t believe in climate change – they think oil will last forever.

- Elon Musk

75. Weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

77. My family fears that the Russians will assassinate me.

- Elon Musk

78. I think you should always be seeking negative feedback.

- Elon Musk

79. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.

- Elon Musk

80. I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.

- Elon Musk

81. Life needs to be more than just solving problems every day. You need to wake up and be excited about the future.

- Elon Musk

82. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

- Elon Musk

83. What I’m trying to do is to maximise the probability of the future being better.

- Elon Musk

84. Don’t confuse schooling with education. I didn’t go to Harvard but the people that work for me did.

- Elon Musk

85. Technology breakthrough: turns out chemtrails are actually a message from time-traveling aliens describing the secret of teleportation.

- Elon Musk

86. There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future?

- Elon Musk

87. 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

88. 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

89. When I started SpaceX I thought that the most likely outcome was failure. And I think to have any other expectation would have been irrational.

- Elon Musk

90. Obviously Tesla is about helping solve the consumption of energy in a sustainable manner, but you need the production of energy in a sustainable manner.

- Elon Musk

91. Pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it, particularly from friends. Hardly anyone does that, and it’s incredibly helpful.

- Elon Musk

92. In the case of Apple, they did originally do production internally, but then along came unbelievably good outsourced manufacturing from companies like Foxconn. We don’t have that in the rocket business. There’s no Foxconn in the rocket business.

- Elon Musk

93. When the zombie apocalypse happens, you’ll be glad you bought a flamethrower. Works against hordes of the undead or your money back!

- Elon Musk

94. The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.

- Elon Musk

95. Even if there’s a zombie apocalypse, you’ll still be able to travel using the Tesla Supercharging system.

- Elon Musk

96. 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

97. Buy an overpriced Boring Company fire extinguisher! You can definitely buy one for less elsewhere, but this one comes with a cool sticker.

- Elon Musk

98. You should be innovating so fast that you’re invalidating your prior patents.

- Elon Musk

99. 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

100. Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.

- Elon Musk

101. If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.

- Elon Musk

102. I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

- Elon Musk

103. I really like computer games, but then if I made really great computer games, how much effect would that have on the world.

- Elon Musk

104. No, I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.

- Elon Musk

105. Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure – the law firms, the real estate, all that – that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.

- Elon Musk

106. We need to figure out how to have the things we love, and not destroy the world.

- Elon Musk

107. 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

108. The extension of life beyond Earth is the most important thing we can do as a species.

- Elon Musk

109. I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It’s the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

- Elon Musk

110. It’s a fixer-upper of a planet but we could make it work.

- Elon Musk

111. I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.

- Elon Musk

112. You’d need millions of zombies for a so-called “apocalypse” anyway. Where would I even get a factory big enough to make so many!?

- Elon Musk

113. 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

114. I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.

- Elon Musk

115. It was obvious to me that we could never colonize Mars without reusability, any more than America would have been colonized if they had to burn the ships after every trip.

- Elon Musk

116. I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.

- Elon Musk

117. If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.

- Elon Musk

118. Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

120. [The Flamethrower] May not be used on Boring Company decorative lacquered hay bales or Boring Company dockside munitions warehouses.

- Elon Musk

121. 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

122. Why is there no Flat Mars Society!?

- Elon Musk

123. If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.

- Elon Musk

124. My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.

- Elon Musk

125. For my part, I will never give up, and I mean never.

- Elon Musk

126. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.

- Elon Musk

127. There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

- Elon Musk

128. Don’t be afraid of new arenas.

- Elon Musk

129. The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.

- Elon Musk

130. 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

131. Selling an electric sports car creates an opportunity to fundamentally change the way America drives.

- Elon Musk

132. Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.

- Elon Musk

133. America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.

- Elon Musk

134. When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength – 400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well, it’s really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore after that.

- Elon Musk

135. As a child I would just question things...

- Elon Musk

136. 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.

- Elon Musk

137. 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

138. I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.

- Elon Musk

139. 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

140. 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

141. I think there are too many smart people pursuing internet stuff, finance, and law. That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.

- Elon Musk

142. 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.

- Elon Musk

143. Science is discovering the essential truths about what exists in the Universe, engineering is about creating things that never existed.

- Elon Musk

144. You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.

- Elon Musk

145. The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there’s going to be an extinction event.

- Elon Musk

146. I wonder how many dead one-planet civilizations are out there in the cosmos that never made it to the other planet and ultimately extinguished themselves or were destroyed by external factors. Probably a few.

- Elon Musk

147. I started SpaceX with the expectation of failure.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

149. That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: vacation will kill you.

- Elon Musk

150. My opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.

- Elon Musk

151. 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

152. I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact.

- Elon Musk

153. Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.

- Elon Musk

154. 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

155. You want to have a future where you’re expecting things to be better, not one where you’re expecting things to be worse.

- Elon Musk

156. Winning ‘Motor Trend’ Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.

- Elon Musk

157. 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.

- Elon Musk

158. Don’t do this.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

160. If you need inspiring words, don’t do it.

- Elon Musk

161. You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that’s wrong with it and fix it. Seek negative feedback, particularly from friends.

- Elon Musk

162. To our knowledge, life exists on only one planet, Earth. If something bad happens, it’s gone. I think we should establish life on another planet – Mars in particular – but we ’re not making very good progress. SpaceX is intended to make that happen.

- Elon Musk

163. 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.

- Elon Musk

164. When you struggle with a problem, that’s when you understand it.

- Elon Musk

165. I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I’ve got kids and responsibilities, so I can’t be my own test pilot. That wouldn’t be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it’s a sensible thing to do.

- Elon Musk

166. If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.

- Elon Musk

167. 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.

- Elon Musk

168. I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.

- Elon Musk

169. Constantly think about how you could be doing things better.

- Elon Musk

170. People often mistake technology for a static picture. It’s less like a picture and more like a movie. It’s the velocity of technology innovation that matters. It’s the acceleration.

- Elon Musk

171. Automotive franchise laws were put in place decades ago to prevent a manufacturer from unfairly opening stores in direct competition with an existing franchise dealer that had already invested time, money and effort to open and promote their business.

- Elon Musk

172. Don’t just follow the trend. You may have heard me say that it’s good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles. Which is, rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

174. My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail.

- Elon Musk

175. Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.

- Elon Musk

176. Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

178. 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

179. I’m reasonably optimistic about the future, especially the future of the United States – for the century, at least.

- Elon Musk

180. If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if you – the probable outcome is failure.

- Elon Musk

181. Possessions weigh you down.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

183. 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

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

- Elon Musk

185. There’s nothing – I’ve bought everything I want. I don’t like yachts or anything; you know, I’m not a yacht person, and I’ve got pretty much the nicest plane I’d want to have.

- Elon Musk

186. They were building a Ferrari for every launch, when it was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick.

- Elon Musk

187. Many things are improbable, only a few are impossible.

- Elon Musk

188. I realized that a methane-oxygen rocket engine could achieve a specific impulse greater than 380.

- Elon Musk

189. I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don’t retire before I go senile, then I’ll do more damage than good at that point.

- Elon Musk

190. You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.

- Elon Musk

191. 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

192. But wait, there’s more: the flamethrower is sentient, its safe word is “cryptocurrency” and it comes with a free blockchain.

- Elon Musk

193. So, there’s quite a big keep-out zone, and when you factor the keep-out zone into account, the solar panels put on that area would typically generate more power than that nuclear power plant.

- Elon Musk

194. Funded by the government just means funded by the people. Government, by the way, has no money. It only takes money from the people. Sometimes people forget that that’s really what occurs.

- Elon Musk

195. 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.

- Elon Musk

196. Constantly seek criticism. A well thought out critique of what you’re doing is as valuable as gold.

- Elon Musk

197. I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.

- Elon Musk

198. 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

199. There are some important differences between me and Tony Stark, like I have five kids, so I spend more time going to Disneyland than parties.

- Elon Musk

200. Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.

- Elon Musk

201. 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.

- Elon Musk

202. 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.

- Elon Musk

203. What most people know but don’t realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn’t there, we’d be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.

- Elon Musk

204. 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.

- Elon Musk

205. The overarching goal of Tesla is to help reduce carbon emissions and that means low cost and high volume. We will also serve as an example to the auto industry, proving that the technology really works and customers want to buy electric vehicles.

- Elon Musk

206. I’m a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.

- Elon Musk

207. Obviously, a flamethrower is a super terrible idea. Definitely don’t buy one.

- Elon Musk

208. An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

- Elon Musk

209. We have a strict ‘no a-hole policy’ at SpaceX. And we fire people they are. I mean, we give them a little bit of warning. But if they continue to be an a-hole, then they’re fired.

- Elon Musk

210. Well, my motivation behind Tesla is really to do as much good as possible for the environment and the electric-vehicle revolution. I think there is still a lot of work to do and if we were to sell to a big company, I’m not sure it would progress at the same pace.

- Elon Musk

211. For me it was never about money, but solving problems for the future of humanity.

- Elon Musk

212. If you’re not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea.

- Elon Musk

213. We have this handy fusion reactor in the sky called the sun, you don’t have to do anything, it just works. It shows up every day.

- Elon Musk

214. As you heat the planet up, it's just like boiling a pot.

- Elon Musk

215. What I’m trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.

- Elon Musk

216. I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents.

- Elon Musk

217. The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.

- Elon Musk

218. Stop being patient and start asking yourself, how do I accomplish my 10-year plan in 6 months? You will probably fail but you will be a lot further ahead of the person who simply accepted it was going to take 10 years.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

220. Even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we’re going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.

- Elon Musk

221. Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

- Elon Musk

222. You want to do things you’re passionate about but also are useful to other people.

- Elon Musk

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

- Elon Musk

224. I think it’s very unwise to be shorting Tesla. There’s a tsunami of hurt for those holding a short position. It’s going to be very unpleasant. I advise people to exit while there is still time.

- Elon Musk

225. 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