Elon Musk about Engineering

“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...”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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