Elon Musk says

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

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Engineering Quotes Elon Musk about Engineering

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

“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.”

“Like a rocket is just a giant engineering compromise, and you just have to choose where you're gonna eat the pain and you can choose it in propulsion. You can choose it in structures. You know, where is the bit that's gonna destroy your life?”

“Expectations are the enemy here — they limit the number of great landing spots, and make the idealized one impossibly hard. Relax your expectations, and hundreds of positive possibilities open up.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“A rocket is a huge engineering compromise.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“If you love testing, you should love shipping even more. It's the test of all tests.”

“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.”