When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
Elon Musk
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.
Some people don't like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.
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.
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.
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.
I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.
If something's important enough, you should try. Even if - the probable outcome is failure.
It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.
Patience is a virtue, and I'm learning patience. It's a tough lesson.
I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.
Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.
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.
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.
Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.
Life is too short for long-term grudges.
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.
Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.
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.
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.
Great companies are built on great products.
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.
I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems... It's got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.
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.
Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done.
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.
In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.
I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.
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.
People should pursue what they're passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.
When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.
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 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 do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I'm really good at email.
If you don't have sustainable energy, you have unsustainable energy. The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy faster than it would otherwise occur.
I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It's a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that's what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.
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 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.
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?'
I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.
It's important that we attempt to extend life beyond Earth now. It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it's been possible, and that window could be open for a long time - hopefully it is - or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now.
If humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.
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.
I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.
We're already cyborgs. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you, but the interface is through finger movements or speech, which are very slow.
I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.
I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.
Rockets are cool. There's no getting around that.
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.
It's not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it's a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere.
