Elon Musk Quotes (Author of How to Make a Spaceship) (2024)

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

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“It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”
― Elon Musk

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“You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve”
― Elon Musk

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“You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”
― Elon Musk

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“My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.”
― Elon Musk

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“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.”
― Elon Musk

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“I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.”
― Elon Musk

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“It is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”
― Elon Musk

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“Constantly seek criticism. A well thought out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold.”
― Elon Musk

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“I think it would be great to be born on Earth and die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact.”
― Elon Musk

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“No, I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated”
― Elon Musk

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“If you need inspiration, don't do it.”
― Elon Musk

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“I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad.”
― Elon Musk

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

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“The idea of lying on a beach as my main thing just sounds like the worst. It sounds horrible to me. I would go bonkers. I would have to be on serious drugs. I’d be super-duper bored. I like high intensity.”
― Elon Musk

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“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 tht makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”
― Elon Musk

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

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

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“In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a [?], like a collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing.”
― Elon Musk

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“I take the position that I'm always to some degree wrong, and the aspiration is to be less wrong.”
― Elon Musk

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

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“When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength--400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well, it's really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn't afraid of the dark anymore after that.”
― Elon Musk

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“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.”
― Elon Musk

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

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“I could go and buy one of the islands in the
Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and
create a new company.”
― Elon Musk

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“There needs to be an intersection of the set of people who wish to go, and the set of people who can afford to go...and that intersection of sets has to be enough to establish a self-sustaining civilisation. My rough guess is that for a half-million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go. But it’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies...even at a million people you’re assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars. You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people. But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we’re talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship...If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonise the whole Solar System, because we’ll have created a strong economic forcing function for the improvement of space travel. We’ll go to the moons of Jupiter, at least some of the outer ones for sure, and probably Titan on Saturn, and the asteroids. Once we have that forcing function, and an Earth-to-Mars economy, we’ll cover the whole Solar System. But the key is that we have to make the Mars thing work. If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation. That’s the next step.”
― Elon Musk

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“Life needs to be more than just solving problems every day. You need to wake up and be excited about the future.”
― Elon Musk

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“It’s pretty hard to get to another star system. Alpha Centauri is four light years away, so if you go at 10 per cent of the speed of light, it’s going to take you 40 years, and that’s assuming you can instantly reach that speed, which isn’t going to be the case. You have to accelerate. You have to build up to 20 or 30 per cent and then slow down, assuming you want to stay at Alpha Centauri and not go zipping past. It’s just hard. With current life spans, you need generational ships. You need antimatter drives, because that’s the most mass-efficient. It’s doable, but it’s super slow.”
― Elon Musk

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