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Elon Musk
196 quotes
“We need to figure out how to have the things we love, and not destroy the world.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 26 March 2012
“In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more 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 (born 1971) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 26 April 2012
“So, I think the best analogy for rocket engineers, if you want to create complicated software, you can't run as an integrated whole, or run on the computer it's intended to run on, but, first time you run it, it has to run with no bugs. That's the essence of it. So ... we missed the mark there.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 15 June 2012 15 June 2012 Caltech Commencement Address
“I'd rather be optimistic and wrong; than pessimistic and right. .. We have planes, trains, automobiles and boats, ... What if there was a fifth mode?”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 13 July 2012 regarding Hyperloop
“One thing that is important is that, if you have a choice between a lower valuation with someone you really like, or higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about, take the lower valuation.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 17 July 2012 during interview with PandoDaily - Fireside Chat With Elon Musk
“I would like to die on Mars; just not on impact.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 12 September 2012
“Since our primary competitors [in space launch] are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 19 March 2013
“Even if there's a zombie apocalypse, you'll still be able to travel using the Tesla Supercharging system.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 30 May 2013
“I plan to travel to Mars and make it my home. .. People should be traveling to Mars and doing it in our lifetime.”
“Only by breaking through to new paradigms of space travel will more than a handful of us ever get to Mars and make it a potentially livable place... Getting to Mars is too big an accomplishment for us to feel proud by just by swinging by. We are a nation of enterprise as well as exploration, and we're not about to go there without making something of it.”
“Sending large numbers of people to explore and settle Mars in the decades ahead isn't inevitable, but it is entirely possible. The biggest challenge isn't the engineering and spacecraft, however difficult they may be. Instead, it's making sure that a sustained Mars campaign proceeds as a national priority, and that will happen only if the American people are behind it. We have the opportunity now to make this happen. We might not be so fortunate in the future.”
“Everything works in PowerPoint; but if you have the physical item or some demonstration software, that's much more convincing to people than a PowerPoint presentation or a business plan.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: January 23, 2015 Colonizing Mars The Future Belongs to SpaceX and Elon Musk
“First, you're going to have to live in transparent domes, but eventually, you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet. You can warm it up.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (September 9, 2015), as cited in "Elon Musk’s new idea: Nuke Mars", CNN (September 11, 2015)
“[The quick way to warm the planet] Drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (September 9, 2015), as cited in "Elon Musk’s new idea: Nuke Mars", CNN (September 11, 2015)
“I'm trying to do useful things.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (September 9, 2015), as cited in "Elon Musk’s new idea: Nuke Mars", CNN (September 11, 2015)
“They [Apple] have hired people we've fired. We always jokingly call Apple the "Tesla Graveyard." If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I'm not kidding. ... cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can't just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car. But for Apple, the car is the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: September 25, 2015 All Charged Up in Berlin in Handelsblatt
“AI is much more advanced than people realize. ... Humanity's position on this planet depends on its intelligence so if our intelligence is exceeded, it's unlikely that we will remain in charge of the planet.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 25 October 2015 Artificial intelligence: Should we be as terrified as Elon Musk and Bill Gates? in ZDNet
“SpaceX's got 5,000 people. I get a lot of attention, but they are really doing the work.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 8 April 2016 SpaceX Dragon Headed to the ISS at NASA Post-Launch News Conference
“I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 8 March 2016
“The probability of death is quite high on the first [human] mission [to Mars].”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 27 September 2016 "Elon Musk's Plan To Colonize Mars Gives Us The Sci-Fi Future We Crave: Now let's see if he can make it reality." Popular Science magazine
“The main reason I personally am accumulating assets is in order to fund this..to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multi-planetary. If things go super well it might be kind of in the 10-year timeframe...but there is a huge amount of risk. It is going to cost a lot. There is a good chance we don’t succeed.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Musk, talking about the propect of colonising Mars. Quoted in "Musk eyes plan for human travel to Mars by 2025", Financial Times (September 27 2016).
“It would be an incredible adventure. And life needs to be more than just solving every day problems. You need to wake up and be excited about the future”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On "eyeing" for Mars, IAC 2016 meeting, presentation on sustainable Mars colonization.
“I can be on my own private island with naked super models, drinking mai tais, but I'm not. I'm in the factory working my ass off, so I don't want to hear about how hard everyone else in the factory works.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in "Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century" (2021) by Tim Higgins
“People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it will, I think, by itself degrade, actually. You look at great civilizations like Ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And then the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts. They forgot how to do it.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 9 May 2017 Career advice from Elon Musk's latest TED interview, in one sentence at 2017 TED conference
“I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 3 October 2017 in DK Smithsonian, Journey: An Illustrated History of Travel, ISBN 978-1-4654-6414-9 (Page 343).
“Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 16 October 2017 in LinkedIn: What Elon Musk Taught Me About Growing A Business
“Rocket tech applied to a car opens up revolutionary possibilities.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 19 November 2017 tweet
“I love Twitter. How much is it?”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 22 December 2017 tweet & tweet
“Holy flying fuck, that thing took off!”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 12 February 2018 reaction to Falcon Heavy Launch
“I don’t get the little ship thing. You can’t show up at Mars in something the size of a rowboat. What if there are Martians? It would be so embarrassing.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 19 February 2018
“I suggest that you call people you know in Thailand, find out what’s actually going on and stop defending child rapists, you fucking asshole. He’s an old, single white guy from England who’s been traveling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya Beach, until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time. As for this alleged threat of a lawsuit, which magically appeared when I raised the issue (nothing was sent or raised beforehand), I fucking hope he sues me.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 30 August 2018 e-mail to Ryan Mac of BuzzFeed with follow-up commentary about Unsworth, per 4 September 2018 article
“Off the record. We haven't had a conversation at all. I sent you an off the record email, which very clearly and unambiguously said "off the record". If you want to publish off the record comments and destroy your journalistic credibility, that's up to you. As for answering more questons, I would be happy to do so, but not with someone who just told me that they will not honor accepted rules of journalism.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 4 September 2018 retort to Ryan Mac
“People tend to think like, 'Why should electric vehicles have a subsidy,' but they're not taking into account that all fossil fuel-burning vehicles fundamentally are subsidized by the cost—the environmental cost—to Earth, but nobody's paying for it... We are going to pay for it, obviously—in the future we'll pay for it. It's just not paid for now.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: interview with Joe Rogan (September 6, 2018)
“if you assume any rate of improvement at all, then games will be indistinguishable from reality we could be in base reality this is just about probability there are many, many simulations you might as well call them reality, or multiverse they're running on the substrate ... that substrate is probably boring”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 1169 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: discussing simulation theory on #1169 of Joe Rogan Experience (September 7, 2018)
“Guardian is the most insufferable newspaper on planet Earth.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 7 September 2018 e-mail to Guardian, possibly repeated later on a Joe Rogan podcast
“I don't think most people, even in the aerospace industry, like, know what question to ask. Like it took us a long time to even frame the question correctly. But once we could frame the question correctly, the answer was, I wouldn't say easy, but, the answer flowed once the question could be framed with precision. Framing that question with precision was very difficult.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 17 September 2018 regarding the BFR, during announcement of first private passenger on lunar mission
“im actually cat girl here’s selfie rn”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 25 October 2018 tweet
“When a species of primate, homo sapiens, became much smarter than other primates, it pushed all the other ones into a very small habitat. So there are very few mountain gorillas and orangutans and chimpanzees — monkeys in general. They occupy small corners of the world - cages...zoos. Even the jungles that they're in are narrowly defined so they were sort of like big cages ... So, you know, that's one possible outcome for us.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in "Elon Musk: Humans must merge with machines", Axios (Nov 26, 2018)
“The fundamental message that consumers should be taking today is that it's financially insane to buy anything other than a Tesla. It would be like owning a horse in three years. I mean, fine if you want to own a horse. But you should go into it with that expectation. If you buy a car that does not have the hardware for full self-driving, it is like buying a horse. And the only car that has the hardware for full self-driving is a Tesla.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 22 April 2019 during the Tesla Autonomy Investor Day, at Tesla Headquarters in Palo Alto, CA
“It’s so insane the way rockets work today. It would be like if you got a plane and the way you get to your destination is you bail out with a parachute over the city in question and your plane crash lands somewhere. That’s how rockets work today—with the exception of Falcon 9. This is completely bonkers. ..If it were to take longer to convince NASA and the authorities that we can do it versus just doing it, then [SpaceX] might just do it [ourselves]. It may literally be easier to just land Starship on the moon than try to convince NASA that we can.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 12 July 2019 in Time magazine article
“Nuke Mars! T-shirt soon.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 15 August 2019 tweets, as cited in "Elon Musk Floats 'Nuke Mars' Idea Again (He Has T-Shirts)", Space.com (August 17, 2019)
“Nuke Mars refers to a continuous stream of very low fallout nuclear fusion explosions above the atmosphere to create artificial suns. Much like our sun, this would not cause Mars to become radioactive. Not risky imo & can be adjusted/improved real-time. Essentially need to figure out most effective way to convert mass to energy, as Mars is slightly too far from this solar system's fusion reactor (the sun).”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 20 August 2019 tweet as cited in "Nuke Mars? Elon Musk seems serious about plan to terraform the red planet", NBC News (August 22, 2019, reprinted from Space.com)
“No, just like [Unsworth] didn’t clarify he wanted to sodomize me with a submarine. I didn’t think it required clarification, I think that would have been worse. If you called someone a motherf’er I don’t think you would have to clarify you don’t actually commit incest. It would sound disingenuous.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 3 December 2019 per CNN article exploring lawsuit from Vernon Unsworth
“If somebody wants to stay in their house, that’s great. They should be allowed to stay in their house, and they should not be compelled to leave. But to say that they cannot leave their house, and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 30 April 2020 quote by Susan Walsh, “Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Aren’t on the Same Page,” New York Times
“We must pass the great filter!”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 21 June 2020 tweet and TechFilter
“We [the United States] will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 24 July 2020 tweet (archived)
“The extreme difficulty of scaling production of new technology is not well understood. It’s 1000% to 10,000% harder than making a few prototypes. The machine that makes the machine is vastly harder than the machine itself.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 21 September 2020 tweet
“All designs are wrong, it's just a matter of how wrong.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Said while giving tour of Starbase to Tim Dodd (July 30, 2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
“Possibly, the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Said while giving tour of Starbase to Tim Dodd (July 30, 2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
“If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it. But it must be open source accounting, so the public sees precisely how the money is spent.”
Elon Musk (born 1971) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 31 October 2021 9:50am reply by Elon to 30 October 2021 tweet by Eli David regarding the United Nations' World Food Program, reported 1 November 2021 by RebelNews