Elon Musk Quotes

Elon Musk Quotes On Engineering Technology

• “The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.”  – Elon Musk
• “Government isn’t that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you’ve got to have commercial companies do it.”  – Elon Musk
• “I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It’s the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.”  – Elon Musk
• “A utility can handle up to 20% of production from solar and that helps the grid because it produces electricity when needed. Solar power peaks in the middle of the day and that’s also when air conditioning is running and businesses are operating, so power production matches usage.”  – Elon Musk
• “Automotive franchise laws were put in place decades ago to prevent a manufacturer from unfairly opening stores in direct competition with an existing franchise dealer that had already invested time, money and effort to open and promote their business.”  – Elon Musk
• “Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.”  – Elon Musk
• “I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.”  – Elon Musk
• “If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.”  – Elon Musk
• “An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.”  – Elon Musk
• “I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.”  – Elon Musk
• “If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.”  – Elon Musk
• “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.”  – Elon Musk
• “I’m interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you’re like, ‘Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?'”  – Elon Musk
• “My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.”  – Elon Musk
• “Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.”  – Elon Musk
• “I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.”  – Elon Musk
• “There’s no better place in the world for technology start-ups than Silicon Valley; there’s such an incredible well of talent and capital and resources. The whole system is set up to foster the creation of new companies. Elon Musk”  – Elon Musk
• “In the case of Apple, they did originally do production internally, but then along came unbelievably good outsourced manufacturing from companies like Foxconn. We don’t have that in the rocket business. There’s no Foxconn in the rocket business.”  – Elon Musk

Elon Musk Quotes On Social Medias

• “I have made the mistaken assumption – and I will attempt to be better at this – of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season. And that is my mistake.”  – Elon Musk
• “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.”  – Elon Musk
• “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.”  – Elon Musk
• “I hate writing about personal stuff. I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don’t use them.”  – Elon Musk
• “Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It’s hard to break into a network once it’s formed.”  – Elon Musk
• “I think there should be regulations on social media to the degree that it negatively affects the public good.”  – Elon Musk

Elon Musk Quotes on AI (Artificial Intelligence)

• “If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it…It’s just like, if we’re building a road and an anthill just happens to be in the way, we don’t hate ants, we’re just building a road.”
• “China, Russia, soon all countries w[ith] 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(y) than North Korea.”
• “AI will be the best or worst thing ever for humanity.”
• “[Governments] don’t need to follow normal laws. They will obtain AI developed by companies at gunpoint, if necessary.”
• “Mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes…why do we have no regulatory oversight?”
• “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and he’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.”  – Elon Musk
• “AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation than be reactive.”
• ‘The biggest issue I see with so-called AI experts is that they think they know more than they do, and they think they are smarter than they actually are…This tends to plague smart people. They define themselves by their intelligence and they don’t like the idea that a machine could be way smarter than them, so they discount the idea — which is fundamentally flawed.”
• “I have exposure to the most cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned by it…AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs or bad food were not — they were harmful to a set of individuals within society, of course, but they were not harmful to society as a whole.”

Elon Musk Quotes About Cars

• “A Prius is not a true hybrid, really. The current Prius is, like, 2 percent electric. It’s a gasoline car with slightly better mileage.”  – Elon Musk
• “Even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we’re going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.”  – Elon Musk
• “Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.”  – Elon Musk
• “Some companies out there quote a start of production that is substantially in advance of when customers get their cars.”  – Elon Musk
• “Stationary storage will be as big as the car business long term. The growth rate will probably be several times what it is for the car business.”  – Elon Musk
• “The problem with car dealerships is you’ve already decided what you want to buy before you even go there, and you’re really just going there to talk through some annoying negotiation.”  – Elon Musk
• “The U.S. automotive industry has been selling cars the same way for over 100 years, and there are many laws in place to govern exactly how that is to be accomplished.”  – Elon Musk
• “The X is an amazing car, but we kind of got carried away with the art and technology. Obviously, you want great art. You want great technology. But we did get a little distracted from our mission, which was to advance the cause of electric vehicles. And it probably delayed us a little bit with the Model 3 as well.”  – Elon Musk
• “Winning ‘Motor Trend’ Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.”  – Elon Musk
• “I think there are more politicians in favor of electric cars than against. There are still some that are against, and I think the reasoning for that varies depending on the person, but in some cases, they just don’t believe in climate change – they think oil will last forever.”  – Elon Musk
• “I’ve actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don’t mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.”  – Elon Musk
• “It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don’t think it’s possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.”  – Elon Musk
• “The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.”  – Elon Musk
• “We could definitely make a flying car – but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that’s super safe and quiet? Because if it’s a howler, you’re going to make people very unhappy.”  – Elon Musk
• “I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.”  – Elon Musk
• “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.”  – Elon Musk
• “I like the word ‘autopilot’ more than I like the word ‘self-driving.’ ‘Self-driving’ sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. ‘Autopilot’ is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.”  – Elon Musk
• “Selling an electric sports car creates an opportunity to fundamentally change the way America drives.”  – Elon Musk
• “Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.”  – Elon Musk

Elon Musk Quotes About SpaceX

• “I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.”  – Elon Musk
• “Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.”  – Elon Musk
• “I’m trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.”  – Elon Musk
• “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.”  – Elon Musk
• “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.”  – Elon Musk
• “Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.”  – Elon Musk
• “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.”  – Elon Musk
• “If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.”  – Elon Musk
• “The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.”  – Elon Musk
• “If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.”  – Elon Musk
• “My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars – this is very important – so you don’t have to carry the return fuel when you go there.”  – Elon Musk
• “On one of the SpaceX flights, we had a secret payload: a wheel of cheese. We flew to orbit and brought it back, so it was the world’s first ‘space cheese.’ It was, in part, a tribute to Monty Python.”  – Elon Musk
• “In order for us to have a future that’s exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we’re a space-bearing civilization.”  – Elon Musk
• “The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.”  – Elon Musk
• “We have a strict ‘no-assholes policy’ at SpaceX.”  – Elon Musk
• “It is theoretically possible to warp spacetime itself, so you’re not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but it’s actually space that’s moving.”  – Elon Musk
• “SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company’s lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.”  – Elon Musk
• “The pace of progress on Mars depends upon the pace of progress of SpaceX.”  – Elon Musk
• “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.”  – Elon Musk
• “I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.”  – Elon Musk
• “What I’m trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.”  – Elon Musk
• “You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.”  – Elon Musk
• “It is true that SpaceX is partially a government contractor, but it would be unfair to say that SpaceX is entirely a government contractor.”  – Elon Musk
• “So we originally expected to make about 35 gigawatt hours at the cell level and about 50 gigawatt hours at the module or pack level. Now we are expecting to do about 150 gigawatt hours in the same volumetric space as the original design.”  – Elon Musk
• “I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.”  – Elon Musk
• “If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.”  – Elon Musk