Elon Musk Quotes about Space, AI, Tesla and more

Elon Musk, born in South Africa in 1971, is not just known for pushing breakthrough innovation at SpaceX, Tesla Motors, OpenAI and The Boring Company. The self-proclaimed "Technoking of Tesla" is also known for his Twitter rants and witty comments. Elon Musk's comments on Twitter even sparked legal investigations in the past.

Many of his more popular thoughts made it into this curated collection of Elon Musk's best quotes. Learn about his experiences as a co-founder of multiple billion-dollar companies, thought-leader in AI, Space and engineering.

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

“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.”

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

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

“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 Best Part Is No Part...”

“Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.”

“The goal of OpenAI is really just to take the set of actions that are most likely to improve the positive futures. Like, if you can think of like the future as a set of probability streams that branch out and then converge; collapse down to a particular event and then branch out again and there's a certain set of probabilities associated with the future being positive and a different type flavours of that and at OpenAI we want to try to guide… do whatever we can to increase the probability of the good futures happening.”

“I think if AI power is widely distributed then, and there's not, say, one entity that has some super AI that is a million times smarter than anything else, if instead the AI power is broadly distributed and, to the degree that we can link AI power to each individual's will, like you'd have your AI agent, everyone would have their AI agent, and then if somebody did try and do something really terrible then the collective will of others could overcome that bad actor, which you can't do if there's one AI that's a million times better than everyone else.”

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

“Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app”

“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.”

“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I think AI is something that is risky at the civilization level, not merely at the individual risk level, and that's why it really demands a lot of safety research.”

“I think A.I. is probably the single biggest item in the near term that’s likely to affect humanity. So it’s very important that we have the advent of A.I. in a good way, that it’s something that if you could look into a crystal ball and see the future, you would like that outcome. Because it is something that could go wrong… So we really need to make sure it goes right.”

“I think having a high bandwidth interface to the brain [is extremely important], we are currently bandwidth limited. We have a digital tertiary self. In the form of our email, computers, phones, applications, we are effectively superhuman. But we are extremely bandwidth constrained in that interface between the cortex and that tertiary digital form of yourself, and helping solve that bandwidth constraint would be very important for the future as well.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication […] No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.”

“The best of the available alternatives that I can come up with [regarding A.I.], and maybe somebody else can come up with a better approach or a better outcome, is that we achieve democratization of A.I. technology. Meaning that no one company or small set of individuals has control over advanced A.I. technology. That’s very dangerous, it could also get stolen by somebody bad. Like some evil dictator. A country could send their intelligence agency to go steal it and gain control. It just becomes a very unstable situation if you have any incredibly powerful A.I. You just don’t know whose going to control that.”

“It’s not as though I think the risk is that A.I. will develop a will of its own right off the bat, the concern is more that someone may use it in a way that is bad. Or even if they weren’t going to use it in a way that's bad, that someone could take it from them and use it in a way that’s bad. That I think is quite a big danger. So I think we must have democratization of A.I. technology and make it widely available. And that’s obviously the reason that you [Sam Altman], me, and the rest of the team created OpenAI - was to help spread out A.I. technologies so it doesn’t get concentrated in the hands of a few.”

“If we can effectively merge with A.I. by improving the neural link between the cortex and your digital extension of yourself - which already exists, it just has a bandwidth issue - then effectively you become an A.I. human symbiote. And if that then is widespread, [where] anyone who wants it can have it, then we solve the control problem as well. We don’t have to worry about some evil dictator A.I., because we are the A.I. collectively. That seems to be the best outcome I can think of.”

“OpenAI seems to be going really well. We have a really talented team that are working hard. OpenAI is structured as a non-profit, but many non-profits do not have a sense of urgency… but OpenAI does. I think people really believe in the mission, I think it’s important. It’s about minimizing the risk of existential harm in the future…”

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

“The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment.”

“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?”

“China, Russia, soon all countries with strong computer science. Competition for AI superiority at national level most likely cause of WW3.”

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

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

“AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation than be reactive.”

“I am not normally an advocate of regulation and oversight… I think one should generally err on the side of minimizing those things… but this is a case where you have a very serious danger to the public.”

“Mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes… Why do we have no regulatory oversight?”

“Never chase the next hot thing. Stop trying to chase the wave. You will never catch it. You always for the most part find out about that stuff too late. Instead, do what you are really passionate about, what you really love. That will position you before the wave even hits, and you will find out about whatever it is before the wave starts, before it gets hot, and that is how you take advantage.”

“Pronouns suck.”

“I've said many times: prototypes are easy, production is hard.”

“Buy & hold stock in companies where you love the product roadmap, sell where you don’t.”

“I mean, I think that if people are concerned about volatility, they should definitely not buy our stock. I’m not here [on an earnings call] to convince you to buy [Tesla] stock. Do not buy it if volatility is scary. There you go.”

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

“Education is basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain.”

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

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

“America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.”

“If humanity is to become multi-planetary, the fundamental breakthrough that needs to occur in rocketry is a rapidly and completely reusable rocket … achieving it would be on a par with what the Wright brothers did. It’s the fundamental thing that’s necessary for humanity to become a space-faring civilization. America would never have been colonized if ships weren’t reusable.”

Space

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

“If you buy a ticket to hell, it isn't fair to blame hell.”

“When I was a child, there's one thing I said: 'I never want to be alone.' That's what I would say.”

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

“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.”

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

“I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and create a new company.”

“Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.”

“You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on... So it's a fixer-upper of a planet.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Constantly think about how you could be doing things better.”

“I take the position that I'm always to some degree wrong, and the aspiration is to be less wrong.”

“In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a [?], like a collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing.”

“Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.”

“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 tht makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”

“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.”

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

“I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad.”

“No, I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated”

“It is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”

“Constantly seek criticism. A well thought out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold.”

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

“I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths… and then reason up from there.”

“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.”

“You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve”

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

“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.”

“It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

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

“Twitter is like open-sourcing the news”

“I love when people complain about Twitter … on Twitter 🤣🤣”

“You might notice small, sometimes major, improvements in speed of Twitter. Will be especially significant in countries far away from USA.”

“Wasn’t Twitter supposed to die by now or something … ?”

“This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.”

“Twitter is purging a lot of spam/scam accounts right now, so you may see your follower count drop”

“The Constitution is greater than any President. End of story.”