In this blog post, we will look at the best Elon Musk quotes that show his visionary nature and can motivate aspiring entrepreneurs and dreamers. Elon Musk is a famous entrepreneur and business magnate known for his innovative ideas. He started companies like Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink, which have revolutionized industries and inspired countless individuals around the globe.
So, here are the best Elon Musk quotes about business, society, politics, space and more.
Elon Musk Inspirational Quotes
1. “You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”
2. “I think people can choose to be not ordinary. You know, they can choose to not necessarily conform to the conventions that were taught to them by their parents. So, yes, I think it’s possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”
3. “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
4. “I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.”
5. “Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.”
6. “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.”
7. “People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.”
8. “Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”
9. “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.”
Elon Musk Business Quotes
1. “I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.”
2. “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.”
3. “Starting a business is not for everyone. Starting a business – I’d say, number one is have a high pain threshold.”
4. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.”
5. “When my brother and I were starting our first company, instead of getting an apartment, we just rented a small office and we slept on the couch.”
6. “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.”
7. “Pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends.”
8. “There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.”
9. “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.”
10. “Constantly seek criticism. A well thought out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold.”
11. “I think it’s very difficult to start companies and quite painful. There’s a friend of mine who’s got a good phrase for doing a startup: ‘It’s like eating glass and staring into the abyss.’ If you’re sort of wired to do it, then you should do it, but not otherwise. If you need inspiring words, don’t do it.”
12. “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.”
Motivational Elon Musk Quotes
1. “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds aren’t in your favor.”
2. “Never. I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated. For my part, I will never give up, and I mean never.”
3. “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”
4. “If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if the probable outcome is failure.”
5. “I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”
6. “I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.”
7. “The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”
8. “You must be willing to lose it all, but be willing to keep going into the future.”
9. “Don’t tell me what you like, tell me what you don’t like.”
Elon Musk Quotes About Overcoming Fear
1. “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.”
2. “When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, okay, 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.”
3. “I feel fear quite strongly. It’s not as though I just have the absence of fear. I feel it quite strongly. But there are times when something is important enough, you believe in it enough, that you do it in spite of the fear. People shouldn’t think, ‘I feel fear about this, and therefore I shouldn’t do it.’ It’s normal to feel fear. There’d have to be something mentally wrong [with you] if you didn’t feel fear. […] If you just accept the probabilities, then that diminishes fear.”
Elon Musk Quotes About Taking Risks
1. “There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.”
2. “It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.”
3. “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.”
4. “Take risks now. Do something bold. You won’t regret it.”
Elon Musk Quotes About Innovation
1. “You shouldn’t do things differently just because they’re different. They need to be… better.”
2. “What makes innovative thinking happen?… I think it’s really a mindset. You have to decide.”
3. “Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.”
4. “Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But the brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.”
5. “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.”
6. “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.”
7. “Don’t delude yourself into thinking something’s working when it’s not, or you’re gonna get fixated on a bad solution.”
Elon Musk Quotes About Teams & Relationships
1. “It’s very important to like the people you work with. Otherwise, your job is going to be quite miserable.”
2. “I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.”
3. “The biggest mistake, in general, I’ve made, is to put too much weight on someone’s talent and not enough on their personality. And I’ve made that mistake several times. I think it actually matters whether somebody has a good heart, it really does. I’ve made the mistake of thinking that it’s sometimes just about the brain.”
4. “Generally, I look for a positive attitude and are they easy to work with, are people gonna like working with them? It’s very important to like the people you work with, otherwise life [and] your job is gonna be quite miserable. And, in fact, we have a strict no aholes policy at SpaceX. And we fire people if they are. I mean, we give them a little bit of warning. But if they continue to be an ahole, then they’re fired.”
5. “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.”
Personal Elon Musk Quotes
1. “I don’t consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability. In fact, ideally, you dropped out.”
2. “A source of strength, hm. That’s really not how I think about things. For me, it’s simply: This is something that is important to get done, and we should just keep doing it or die trying. I don’t need a source of strength. [Quitting] is not in my nature, and I don’t care about optimism or pessimism. F*ck that, we’re gonna get it done.”
3. “I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.”
4. “When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.”
5. “I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.”
6. “The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.”
7. “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.”
8. “I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.”
9. “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.”
10. “I’m a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.”
Funny Elon Musk Quotes
1. “Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.”
2. “Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.”
3. “If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.”
4. “Generally, the view that I’ve had on Twitter is if you’re on Twitter, you’re in, like, the meme – you’re in meme war land. If you’re on Twitter, you’re in the arena. And so, essentially, if you attack me, it is therefore OK for me to attack back.”
5. “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.”
6. “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.”
7. “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.”
8. “That’s my lesson for taking a vacation. Vacation will kill you.”
Elon Musk Quotes About the Past & Future
1. “We’re headed toward a situation where AI is vastly smarter than humans.”
2. “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.
3. “If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.”
Elon Musk Quotes About Society, Politics & Humanity
1. “I think there should be regulations on social media to the degree that it negatively affects the public good.”
2. “We can’t have, like, willy-nilly proliferation of fake news. That’s crazy. You can’t have more types of fake news than real news. That’s allowing public deception to go unchecked. That’s crazy.”
3. “We are the first species capable of self-annihilation.”
4. “Here in the West, people often don’t like listening to their leaders, even if they are right.”
5. “Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”
6. “Particularly Instagram, people look like they have a much better life than they really do. People basically seem like they are way better-looking than they really are, and they are way happier-seeming than they really are.”
7. “The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.”
These Elon Musk quotes capture his visionary thinking and entrepreneurial drive. His words serve as inspiration and remind us of the importance of persistence, belief, continuous improvement, and embracing risks.
His words inspire us to think beyond limits and aim for what seems impossible. But nothing is possible without the lack of passion or interest in achieving that goal. Achieving greatness requires unwavering dedication and determination and only by staying focused on our goals, we can overcome obstacles and make significant changes. Elon Musk quotes remind us of the importance of pushing boundaries and embracing challenges in order to create a transformative impact.
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