Quotes by Elon Musk

"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."

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

"Great companies are built on great products."

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

"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."

"I don't think it's a good idea to plan to sell a company."

"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."

"Starting a business is not for everyone. Starting a business - I'd say, number one is have a high pain threshold."

"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. I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself."

"I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I'm really good at email."

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

"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."

"The key to making things affordable is design and technology improvements, as well as scale."

"There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

"If something's important enough, you should try. Even if - the probable outcome is failure."

"The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced."

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

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

"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."

"With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and he's like, yeah, he's sure he can control the demon? Doesn't work out."

"Patience is a virtue, and I'm learning patience. It's a tough lesson."

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

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

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

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

"Rockets are cool. There's no getting around that."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."