Quotes by Elon Musk

Patience is a virtue, and Im learning patience. Its a tough lesson.

In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.

When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.

If anyone thinks theyd rather be in a different part of history, theyre 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. Youd probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.

If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, its not.

Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.

It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.

I think thats the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. Its a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and thats what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

Were 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.

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. Itll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadnt been reusable.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far - the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. Were obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

Its not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and its 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.

Its obviously tricky to convert cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.

If were going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.

America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.

The path to the CEOs office should not be through the CFOs office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.

Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. Thats pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.