First and foremost a successful entrepreneur, Elon has invested his efforts in a number or companies whose aims are to innovate and create technological advancements that run together with Musk’s technological genius. Some of these technological companies that Elon runs include SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink, and Tesla Motors that is known for claiming to dominate and take over not just the EV electric vehicle race but also the race toward inspiring the culture of self-driving cars. It was however decades back when Musk acquired his humongous net worth and estate as he had successful deals with a number of tech companies that included Paypal and X.com, just to name a few.
Together with his business fame and innovation prowess, Elon Musk is known for a number of relationships that he has had throughout the years. Now in his 50s, Elon first got married in the year 2000 to the Canadian author Justine Wilson. Elon had 5 children with Justine until their divorce in 2008. Musk later dated Pride and Prejudice star Talulah Riley, and they married in 2010. The two divorced in 2012, however, they reconciled and remarried in 2013, before divorcing for a second time in 2016. His current relationship is with the Canadian singer, Grimes. Elon has had cameo appearances in a number of blockbuster films including Iron Man 2, Men in Black: International, The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory, and South Park, and is also a regular guest in talk shows around the world.
1. “Life is too short for long-term grudges.”
2. “Great companies are built on great products.”
3. “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.”
4. “People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It’s important that people look forward to coming to work.”
5. “Disruptive technology where you really have a big technology discontinuity… tends to come from new companies.”
6. “When you struggle with a problem, that’s when you understand it.”
7. “It is remarkable how many things you can explode. I’m lucky I have all my fingers.”
8. “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.”
9. “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
10. “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.”
11. “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.”
12. “Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell.”
13. “Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers.”
14. “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.”
15. “People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.”
16. “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.”
17. “Company death – not succeeding with the company – causes me a lot more stress than physical danger”
18. “Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It’s hard to break into a network once it’s formed.”
19. “Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.”
20. “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.”
21. “I do think there should be some regulations on AI.”
22. “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.”
23. “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.”
24. “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.”
25. “Most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying.”
26. “I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.”
27. “If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.”
28. “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.”
29. “The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office. It needs to be through engineering and design.”
30. “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
31. “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.”
32. “I’m actually wondering about putting in a roller coaster — like a functional roller coaster at the factory in Fremont.”
33. “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.”
34. “If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.”
35. “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.”
36. “If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.”
37. “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.”
38. “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.”
39. “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.”
40. “Many things are improbable, only a few are impossible.”
41. “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.”
42. “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 engineered things around me.”
43. “So there’s really two main dimensions along which cost optimization and making something available in the national market can be achieved. One is design iteration, going through multiple versions of something, and then the other is economies of scale. You kind of need both of those things in order to make compelling mass market product. If you look at, like, cell phones and how many design iterations have we gone through with cell phones and look at the scale at which they are made, which is enormous; and that’s what enables everyone to have a supercomputer in their pocket.”
44. “Constantly think about how you could be doing things better and keep questioning yourself.”
45. “When you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics.”
46. “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.”
47. “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.”
48. “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.”
49. “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.”
50. “My motivation for all my companies has been to be involved in something that I thought would have a significant impact on the world.”
51. “In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.”
52. “The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.”
53. “Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”
54. “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.”
55. “It’s very important to like the people you work with, otherwise life [and] your job is gonna be quite miserable.”
56. “My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.”
57. “As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies.”
58. “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 frees my nervous system.”
59. “You want to have a future where you’re expecting things to be better, not one where you’re expecting things to be worse.”
60. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.”
61. “I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.”
62. “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.”
63. “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.”
64. “If something is important enough, you should try and even if you, the probable outcome is a failure.”
65. “Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.”
66. “Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.”
67. “I always invest my own money in the companies that I create.”
68. “I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”
69. “Don’t delude yourself into thinking something’s working when it’s not, or you’re gonna get fixated on a bad solution.”
70. “The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”
