Elon Musk is a business magnate, co-founder of the electric car company Tesla, and founder of the space exploration firm SpaceX. He also co-founded the payments company PayPal, the neurotechnology company Neuralink and the nonprofit organization OpenAI; he is also the owner and chairman of technology company X Corp.
Musk is the wealthiest person in the world; the Bloomberg Billionaires Index reports that he has a net worth of more than $200 billion, mainly from ownership stakes in SpaceX and Tesla.
We’ve gathered some insights from Elon Musk that may be a source of inspiration to aspiring entrepreneurs. Here are 28 quotes from Elon Musk on business, success, and life:
Elon Musk Quotes on Business
1. “The thing to remember is that when companies are little, they’re like tadpoles. I mean, they just die very easily. You need to have an environment that tries to protect little companies and help them get bigger. Silicon Valley does that very well and America, in general, does that very well a lot of the time compared to other countries. Most other countries tend to foster and protect the big companies. Big companies don’t need protection.”
– Speech at the National Press Club
2. “If you’re building a company, you’ve got to gather great people. I mean, all a company is is a group of people that have gathered together to create a product or service. So depending upon how talented and hardworking that group is, and to the degree in which they are focused cohesively in a good direction, that will determine the success of the company. So, do everything you can to gather great people, if you’re creating a company.”
– Commencement speech at the University of Southern California
3. “I think it’s important to take feedback from your environment. You want to be as closed-loop as possible. If we hadn’t responded to what people said, then we probably would not have been successful. So, it’s important to look for things like that and focus on them when you see them, and you correct your prior assumptions.”
– Commencement speech at Caltech
4. “In general, people want to do the right thing and they want to do what’s good. The issue we have right now is that the rules fundamentally favor the bad outcome. When you’re fighting for the good outcome and it’s an uphill battle, it’s just slower. It’s just crazy to have the rules of the game favor a bad outcome.”
– Speech at Paris-Sorbonne University
5. “I’m not sure looking at competitors really helps. It’s sort of like the old adage with running. If you start looking at the other runners, it’s not good, you know.”
– Conversation with Kara Swisher, host of “Recode Decode”
6. “I read a lot of books and talked to lots of people. I didn’t have any one person who was a mentor, but I always looked for feedback from the people around me and feedback from the historical context, which is books, basically. I don’t read many general business books. I like to read biographies or autobiographies. I think those are pretty helpful, and a lot are not really business.”
– Conversation with Kevin Rose, an internet entrepreneur
7. “Starting a business is not for everyone. Generally, starting a business, I’d say, No. 1 is to have a high pain threshold. When you first start a company, there’s lots of optimism and things are great. Happiness at first is high, then you encounter all sorts of issues and happiness will steadily decline, and then you will go through a whole world of hurt, and then eventually, if you succeed—and in most cases, you will not succeed—if you succeed then, after a long time, you will finally get back to happiness.”
– Interview with Inc. Magazine in 2017
8. “In order to make the right decisions, you have to understand something. If you don’t understand something at a detailed level, you cannot make a decision.”
– Conversation with Jonathan Nolan, creator of HBO’s “Westworld”
9. “I don’t think most people, even in the aerospace industry, know what question to ask […] But, the answer flowed once the question could be framed with precision.”
– On SpaceX’s BFR engine, during the announcement of the first private passenger on the lunar starship mission
10. “It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket, as long as you control what happens to that basket.”
– “Entrepreneur of the Year” Interview with Inc. Magazine in 2007
11. “Great companies are built on great products. When the product starts to become shoddy and uncompetitive, so does the company.”
– Conversation with John Paul MacDuffie, professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
12. “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.”
– A 2017 TED interview on career advice
13. “Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.”
– Conversation with Dharmesh Shah, founder of HubSpot
Learn about becoming an entrepreneur: How to Start a Small Business: An Ultimate Guide
Elon Musk Quotes on Motivation & Success
14. “I think the thing that drives me is that I want to be able to think about the future and feel good about that. So, we’re doing what we can to have the future be as good as possible, to be inspired by what is likely to happen, and to look forward to the next day. So, what really drives me is trying to figure out how to make sure that things are great, and going to be so.”
– Speech at the 2017 National Governors Association summer meeting
15. “When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.”
– Speech at D11, a technology conference
16. “I would say try to learn as much as possible that allows you to predict the future or make the future. So the saying is that the best way to predict the future is to make it. And then assess whether what you’re learning is enabling you to predict the future with less error.”
– Conversation with Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba, at the World AI Conference
17. “I mean, there are examples of successful entrepreneurs who never graduated high school and there are those that have Ph.D.’s. So I think the important principle is to be dedicated to learning what you need to know, whether that is in school or empirically.”
– Speech at Stanford University
18. “I don’t ever give up. I mean, I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.”
– Interview with 60 Minutes in 2012
19. “Humanity can address a lot of the suffering that occurs in the world and make things a lot better. I think a lot of times people are quite sort of negative about the present and about the future, but really, if you are a student of history, when else would you really want to be alive? Now is the best time, pretty much. Those who think the past is better have not read enough history.”
– Speech at the California Academy of Sciences
20. “There are just times when something is important enough, and you believe in it enough, that you do it in spite of the fear.”
– Conversation with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
21. “I’m trying to do good things […] I’m trying to do useful things.”
– Interview with Stephen Colbert
22. “Constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”
– Interview with Inc. Magazine in 2021
Elon Musk Quotes on Life
23. “My theory is like, you’d rather be optimistic. I think I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right. Because if you’re pessimistic, it’s going to be miserable.”
– Conversation with Joe Rogan, host of “The Joe Rogan Experience”
24. “A lot of times, the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask.”
– Conversation with Alison van Diggelen, host of “Fresh Dialogues”
25. “Life needs to be more than just solving everyday problems. You need to wake up and be excited about the future.”
– From Musk’s presentation about colonizing Mars at an International Astronautical Congress meeting
Funny Elon Musk Quotes
26. “I would like to die on Mars; just not on impact.”
– Interview with Bloomberg
27. “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.”
– 2018 X (formerly Twitter) post by Musk
28. “We can’t be one of those lame one-planet civilizations!”
– 2022 X (formerly Twitter) post by Musk
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Bottom Line
Elon Musk is the founder of SpaceX and co-founder of Tesla, as well as being involved in numerous other projects and organizations. He learned how to code when he was a child, and sold the source code for his first video game when he was 12. Musk is now considered the wealthiest person in the world, and his years of experience in business are a source of motivation to many. If you need inspiration to succeed, consider these quotes from Elon Musk.
