180+ Elon Musk Quotes on Life, Business, Education, Innovation, the Future, SpaceX and Tesla

One of the pre-eminent entrepreneurs in today's modern world, Elon Musk, is a trailblazer in technology and innovation with a mind that seems to work so differently from the rest of us. With his guts and ability to tackle the most challenging problems facing the entire world head-on, Elon Musk is also an inspiration to many worldwide who aspire to turn their dreams into reality.

Here is a compendium of the best Elon Musk quotes covering a wide range of issues from life and education to business and technology.

Elon Musk Quotes on Life

“From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.”

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

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

“I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.”

“Life is too short for long-term grudges.”

“People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.”

“Be very rigorous in your self-analysis, certainly be extremely tenacious, and just work like hell. Put in 80-100 hours every week. All these improve’s odds of success.”

“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.”

"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."

“[The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy] taught me that the tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but that once you do that, the rest is really easy. 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 that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”

“Your Will is the most accurate way to predict the Future.”

“There are some important differences between me and Tony Stark, like I have five kids, so I spend more time going to Disneyland than parties.”

“If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re 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. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.”

“To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That’s what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games – nothing like saving the world.”

“Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.”

Elon Musk Quotes on Education and Intelligence

Steve Jurvetson from Los Altos, USA, CC BY 2.0

“It shouldn’t be that you’ve got these grades where people move in lockstep and everyone goes through English, math, science, and so forth from fifth grade to sixth grade to seventh grade like it’s an assembly line. People are not objects on an assembly line. That’s a ridiculous notion. People learn and are interested in different things at different paces. You really want to disconnect the whole grade-level thing from the subjects. Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in, in each subject. It seems like a really obvious thing.”

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

“Do you have the right axioms, are they relevant, and are you making the right conclusions based on those axioms? That’s the essence of critical thinking, and yet it is amazing how often people fail to do that. I think wishful thinking is innate in the human brain. You want things to be the way you wish them to be, and so you tend to filter information that you shouldn’t filter.”

“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.”

“I do think a good framework for thinking is physics, you know, the first principles reasoning. What I mean by that is boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means kind of copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that, otherwise mentally you wouldn’t be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics has really figured out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics; it’s really counterintuitive.”

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

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

I had to learn how you make hardware. I’d never seen a CNC machine or laid out carbon fibre. I didn’t know any of these things. But if you read books and talk to experts, you’ll pick it up pretty quickly. […] It’s really pretty straightforward. Just read books and talk to people–particularly books. The data rate of reading is much greater than when somebody’s talking.

“When I was in college, I just thought, ‘Well, what are the things that are most likely to affect the future of humanity at a macro level?’ And it just seemed like there would be the Internet, sustainable energy, making life multi-planetary, and then genetics and AI.”

“Don’t confuse schooling with education. I didn’t go to Harvard but the people that work for me did“

“Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.”

“You want to have a future where you’re expecting things to be better, not one where you’re expecting things to be worse”

“Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure – the law firms, the real estate, all that – that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.”

“The best teacher I ever had was my elementary school principal. Our math teacher quit for some reason, and he decided to sub in himself for math and accelerate the syllabus by a year. We had to work like the house was on fire for the first half of the lesson and do extra homework, but then we got to hear stories of when he was a soldier in WWII. If you didn’t do the work, you didn’t get to hear the stories. Everybody did the work.”

“If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules”

“You can learn whatever you need to do to start a successful business either in school or out of school. A school, in theory, should help accelerate that process, and I think oftentimes it does. It can be an efficient learning process, perhaps more efficient than empirically learning lessons. There are examples of successful entrepreneurs who never graduated high school, and there are those that have PhD’s. I think the important principle is to be dedicated to learning what you need to know, whether that is in school or empirically.”

“I do kinda feel like my head is full! My context-switching penalty is high, and my process isolation is not what it used to be. Frankly, though, I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying. One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree–make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

“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.”

“A lot of kids are in school puzzled as to why they’re there. I think if you can explain the ‘why’ of things, then that makes a huge difference to people’s motivation. Then they understand purpose.”

"I would just question things... It would infuriate my parents... That I wouldn't just believe them when they said something 'cause I'd ask them why. And then I'd consider whether that response made sense given everything else I knew."

Elon Musk Quotes on Management and Leadership

NASA HQ Photo, CC BY 2.0

"I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens."

"It's very important to like the people you work with, otherwise life [and] your job is gonna be quite miserable."

"Don't delude yourself into thinking something's working when it's not, or you're gonna get fixated on a bad solution."

"Really pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it, particularly from friends. ... Hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful."

"If you're co-founder or CEO, you have to do all kinds of tasks you might not want to do... If you don't do your chores, the company won't succeed... No task is too menial."

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

"We have a strict 'no-assholes policy' at SpaceX."

"It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive."

"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."

"People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working."

“I want to accentuate the philosophy that I have with companies in the startup phase, which is a sort of ‘special forces’ approach. The minimum passing grade is excellent. That’s the way I believe startup companies need to be if they’re ultimately going to be large and successful companies. We’d adhered to that to some degree, but we’d strayed from that path in a few places. That doesn’t mean the people that we let go on that basis would be considered bad–it’s just the difference between Special Forces and regular Army. If you’re going to get through a really tough environment and ultimately grow the company to something significant, you have to have a very high level of dedication and talent throughout the organization.“

“The biggest mistake in general that I’ve made–and I’m trying to correct for that–is to put too much of a weighting on somebody’s talent and not enough on their personality […]. It actually matters whether somebody has a good heart. It really does. And I’ve made the mistake of thinking that sometimes it’s just about the brain.”

"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."

“I’m head engineer and chief designer as well as CEO [at SpaceX], so I don’t have to cave to some money guy. I encounter CEOs who don’t know the details of their technology and that’s ridiculous to me.“

"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."

Elon Musk Quotes on Business and Success

Maurizio Pesce from Milan, Italia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

"Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour workweeks and you're putting in 100 hour workweeks, then even if you're doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve."

"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."

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

"Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive, and determination of the people behind it as the product they sell."

"People should pursue what they're passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else."

“Fundamentally, if you don’t have a compelling product at a compelling price, you don’t have a great company.”

“I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.”

“If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if the probable outcome is failure.”

"When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor."

“Start somewhere and then really be prepared to question your assumptions, fix what you did wrong, and adapt to reality.”

“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.”

“If you need inspiring words, don’t do it.”

“We don’t think too much about what competitors are doing because I think it’s important to be focused on making the best possible products. It’s maybe analogous to what they say about if you’re in a race: don’t worry about what the other runners are doing–just run.”

“Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.”

“If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth.”

“Great companies are built on great products.”

“Always solicit critical feedback, particularly from friends. Because, generally, they will be thinking it, but they won’t tell you.”

“I care a lot about the truth of things and trying to understand the truth of things. I think that’s important. If you’re going to come up with some solution, then the truth is really, really important.”

“The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we’re not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.”

“I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.”

"A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies."

“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I want to make a bunch of money.’ […] With the internet, anyone who had a connection anywhere in the world would have access to all the world’s information, just like a nervous system. Humanity was effectively becoming a super organism and qualitatively different than what it had been before, and so I wanted to be part of that.”

“It’s better to approach this [building a company] from the standpoint of saying–rather than you want to be an entrepreneur or you want to make money–what are some useful things that you do that you wish existed in the world?”

"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."

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

“I think the profit motive is a good one if the rules of an industry are properly set up. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with profit. In fact, profit just means that people are paying you more for whatever you’re doing that you’re spending to create it. That’s a good thing.”

"I don't think it's a good idea to plan to sell a company."

"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."

“I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.”

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

“You’re not going to create revolutionary cars or rockets on 40 hours a week. It just won’t work. Colonizing Mars isn’t going to happen on 40 hours a week.”

"I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don't believe in the whole thing of just using other people's money. I don't think that's right. I'm not going to ask other people to invest in something if I'm not prepared to do so myself."

“There’s no map. By its nature, it’s unknown, which means you’re going to make false moves. It must be OK to make false moves.”

"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."

“I’d like to dial it back 5% or 10% and try to have a vacation that’s not just email with a view.”

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

Elon Musk Quotes on Technology and Innovation

Nvidia Corporation, CC BY 2.0

"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."

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

"I don't spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems."

"There's a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering."

“I don’t think everything needs to change the world, you know. […] Just say: ‘Is what I’m doing as useful as it could be?’ Whatever this thing is that you’re trying to create, what would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect? That’s why I think having something that makes a big difference but affects a small to moderate number of people is great, as is something that makes even a small different but affects a vast number of people.“

“The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.”

"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."

“It’s important to create an environment that fosters innovation, but you want to let it evolve in a Darwinian way. You don’t want to, at a high level, at a gut level, pick a technology and decide that that’s the thing that’s going to win because it may not be. You should really let things evolve.”

“When somebody has a breakthrough innovation, it is rarely one little thing. Very rarely, is it one little thing. It’s usually a whole bunch of things that collectively amount to a huge innovation.”

"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."

"Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product."

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

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

"You shouldn't do things differently just because they're different. They need to be... better."

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

“The factory is the machine that builds the machine.”

"You have to say, 'Well, why did it succeed where others did not?'"

"What makes innovative thinking happen?... I think it's really a mindset. You have to decide."

"I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved."

"Disruptive technology where you really have a big technology discontinuity... tends to come from new companies."

"I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done."

"If something has to be designed and invented, and you have to figure out how to ensure that the value of the thing you create is greater than the cost of the inputs, then that is probably my core skill."

“I do think it’s worth thinking about whether what you’re doing is going to result in disruptive change or not. If it’s just incremental, it’s unlikely to be something major. It’s got to be something that’s substantially better than what’s gone on before.”

Elon Musk Quotes on The Future

Daniel Oberhaus, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

"I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future."

“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.”

“It’s 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 you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it's not."

“We’re 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.”

“Let’s say the only thing we had was solar energy – that was the only power source – if you just took a small section of Spain, You could power all of Europe.”

“It’s important that we attempt to extend life beyond Earth now. It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it’s been possible, and that window could be open for a long time – hopefully it is – or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now.”

“The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there’s going to be an extinction event.”

“A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery.”

“With DNA, you have to be able to tell which genes are turned on or off. Current DNA sequencing cannot do that. The next generation of DNA sequencing needs to be able to do this. If somebody invents this, then we can start to very precisely identify cures for diseases.”

"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."

“Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.”

“Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.”

“As you heat the planet up, it’s just like boiling a pot.”

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

“What a lot of people don’t appreciate is that technology does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of really strong engineering talent is applied to the problem. […] There are many examples in history where civilizations have reached a certain technology level and that have fallen well below that and then recovered only millennia later.”

“Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”

“We’re already a cyborg. You have a digital version of yourself or partial version of yourself online in the form of your emails and your social media and all the things that you do. And you have, basically, superpowers with your computer and your phone and the applications that are there. You have more power than the president of the United States had 20 years ago. You can answer any question; you can video conference with anyone anywhere; you can send a message to millions of people instantly. You just do incredible things.”

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

“I think AI is going to be incredibly sophisticated in 20 years. It seems to be accelerating. The tricky thing about predicting things when there is an exponential is that an exponential looks linear close-up. But actually, it’s not linear. And AI appears to be accelerating, as far as I can see.”

“I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.”

"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?'"

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

“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 Quotes on Space and SpaceX

NASA/Aubrey Gemignani, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“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.”

“Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.”

“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.”

“If you look at space companies, they’ve failed either because they’ve had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.”

“The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.”

“You can only go there every two years because the orbital synchronization of Earth and Mars is about every two years. but I think it would be an interesting way for the civilization to develop. People would meet each other and be like, ‘What orbital synchronization did you arrive on?’”

“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.”

“You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.”

“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.”

“If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.”

“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.”

“If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.”

“Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.”

Elon Musk Quotes on Electric Cars and Tesla

Steve Jurvetson from Los Altos, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“Obviously Tesla is about helping solve the consumption of energy in a sustainable manner, but you need the production of energy in a sustainable manner.”

“Some companies out there quote a start of production that is substantially in advance of when customers get their cars.”

“I think long term you can see Tesla establishing factories in Europe, in other parts of the U.S. and in Asia.”

“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.”

“I’m anti-tax, but I’m pro-carbon tax.”

“Tesla is becoming a real car company.”

“I’m glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That’s cool.”

“The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.”

“It’s not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it’s 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.”

“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.”

“We polled Tesla owners, do you want autopilot disabled or not. Not one person wanted it disabled. That’s pretty telling.”

“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.”

“My opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.”

“The goal of Tesla is to accelerate sustainable energy, so we’re going to take a step back and think about what’s most likely to achieve that goal.”

“Yeah, well I think anyone who likes fast cars will love the Tesla. And it has fantastic handling by the way. I mean this car will crush a Porsche on the track, just crush it. So if you like fast cars, you’ll love this car. And then oh, by the way, it happens to be electric and it’s twice the efficiency of a Prius.”

“Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.”

“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.”

“What most people know but don’t realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn’t there, we’d be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.”

“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.”

“Winning ‘Motor Trend’ Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.”

“Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.”

“The reality is that autonomous systems will drive orders of magnitude better than people. In terms of accidents per mile, it’ll be far lower. Technologically, I think it’s about three years away for full autonomy.” [2015]“Owning a car that is not self-driving, in the long term, will be like owning a horse–you would own it and use it for sentimental reasons but not for daily use.”

“For all the supporters of Tesla over the years, and it’s been several years now and there have been some very tough times, I’d just like to say thank you very much. I deeply appreciate the support, particularly through the darkest times.”

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Featured Image Credit: Dan Taylor, Heisenberg Media, CC BY 2.0