Motivational And Inspiring Elon Musk Quotes
Last Updated on November 24, 2022
Summary: I have compiled a list of motivational Elon Musk quotes from many sources, including interviews, publications, and, of course, his Twitter feed. Take some time to read these enlightening quotes by Elon and allow them to motivate you.
Elon Musk is regarded as one of the most successful businesspeople and innovators of our time. Born in 1971 to a Canadian mother and South African father, he grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, before relocating to Canada to enter Queens University and then UC Berkeley.
The billionaire Elon Musk is inspiring millions and no doubt he is a truly confident man and optimistic man. He has shared his failures, his lessons, and his success with the world and that’s what makes him the most admiring person in this century.
Since he is an entrepreneur and risk-taker, I think you’ll find that reading Elon Musk’s words of wisdom will give you the confidence to pursue your wildest dreams and make them a reality.
So here’s a humongous list of motivational quotes by Elon Musk to get you motivated:
Motivational Elon Musk Quotes
Elon Musk
1. “Frankly, though, I think a lot of people can learn a lot more than they think they can.”
2. “I think it matters if someone has a good heart.” – Elon Musk
3. “I’d rather be optimistic and wrong, than pessimistic and right.” – Elon Musk
4. “People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.” – Elon Musk
5. “If you need inspiring words, don’t do it.” – Elon Musk
6. “Try and enjoy yourself. Because actually, life’s pretty good. It really is.” – Elon Musk
7. “Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.” – Elon Musk
8. “It’s kind of silly and fun, but I think that silly and fun things are important.” – Elon Musk
9. “Optimism, pessimism, f*** that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.” – Elon Musk
10. “One of the biggest mistakes people generally make, and I’m guilty of it too, is wishful thinking. You know, like you want something to be true, even if it isn’t true. You ignore the real truth, because of what you want to be true. This is a very difficult trap to avoid.” – Elon Musk
11. “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.” – Elon Musk
12. “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” – Elon Musk
13. “Life is too short for long-term grudges.” – Elon Musk
14. “Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is a disaster.” – Elon Musk
15. “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.” – Elon Musk
16. “It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.” – Elon Musk
17. “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.”
Elon Musk
18. “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.” – Elon Musk
19. “Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.” – Elon Musk
20. “Don’t confuse schooling with education. I didn’t go to Harvard but the people that work for me did” – Elon Musk
21. “Constantly think about how you could be doing things better. Keep questioning yourself.” – Elon Musk
22. “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.” – Elon Musk Quotes
23. “Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time.” – Elon Musk
24. “Great companies are built on great products.” – Elon Musk
25. “Really pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it, particularly from friends. … Hardly anyone does that, and it’s incredibly helpful.” – Elon Musk
Elon Musk
26. “The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication.” – Elon Musk Motivational
27. “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.” – Elon Musk
28. “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.” – Elon Musk
29. “Every 5000th buyer of our boringly boring hat will get a free hat signed by the delivery guy.” – Elon Musk
30. “There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.” – Elon Musk
31. “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.” – Elon Musk
32. “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.” – Elon Musk
33. “No, I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.” – Elon Musk
34. “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.” – Elon Musk
35. “And we need things in life that are exciting and inspiring. It can’t just be about solving some awful problem. There have to be reasons to get up in the morning.” – Elon Musk Quotes
36. “The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.” – Elon Musk
37. “To our knowledge, life exists on only one planet, Earth. If something bad happens, it’s gone. I think we should establish life on another planet–Mars in particular–but we’re not making very good progress. SpaceX is intended to make that happen.” – Elon Musk
38. “I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.” – Elon Musk
39. “Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.” – Elon Musk
40. “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.” – Elon Musk
41. “I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.” – Elon Musk
42. “I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don’t retire before I go senile, then I’ll do more damage than good at that point.” – Elon Musk
43. “There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” – Elon Musk
44. “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.” – Elon Musk
45. “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.” – Elon Musk
46. “Life is too short for long-term grudges.” – Elon Musk
47. “People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.” – Elon Musk
48. “You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.” – Elon Musk
49. “You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.” – Elon Musk
50. “You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve” – Elon Musk
51. “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
52. “No, I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated” – Elon Musk
53. “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
54. “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
55. “One thing that Musk holds in the highest regard is resolve, and he respects people who continue on after being told no.” – Elon Musk
56. “It bothers Musk a bit that his kids won’t suffer like he did. He feels that the suffering helped to make him who he is and gave him extra reserves of strength and will. “They might have a little adversity at school, but these days schools are so protective,” he said. “If you call someone a name, you get sent home. When I was going to school, if they punched you and there was no blood, it was like, ‘Whatever. Shake it off.’ Even if there was a little blood, but not a lot, it was fine. What do I do? Create artificial adversity? How do you do that? The biggest battle I have is restricting their video game time because they want to play all the time. The rule is they have to read more than they play video games. They also can’t play completely stupid video games. There’s one game they downloaded recently called Cookies or something. You literally tap a fucking cookie. It’s like a Psych 101 experiment. I made them delete the cookie game. They had to play Flappy Golf instead, which is like Flappy Bird, but at least there is some physics involved.”
Elon Musk
57. “I’d rather play video games, write software, and read books than try and get an A if there’s no point in getting an A.” – Elon Musk
58. “If you told him that you made a particular choice because ‘it was the standard way things had always been done,’ he’d kick you out of a meeting fast.” – Elon Musk
59. “If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it.” – Elon Musk
60. “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.” – Elon Musk
61. “There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.” – Elon Musk
62. “Money is not his motivation, and, quite frankly, I think it just happens for him,” Justine said. “It’s just there. He knows he can generate it.” – Elon Musk
63. “What’s fascinating is that Musk remains willing to lose it all.” – Elon Musk
64. “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.” – Elon Musk
65. “Don’t delude yourself into thinking something’s working when it’s not, or you’re gonna get fixated on a bad solution.” – Elon Musk
66. “I messed up the first three launches. The first three launches failed. And fortunately, the fourth launch — which was, that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1 — that fourth launch worked. Or it would have been — that would have been it for SpaceX. But fate liked us that day. So, the fourth launch worked.” – Elon Musk
67. “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
68. “Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors. ” – Elon Musk
69. “Entrepreneurship is more like eating glass while staring at the abyss of death.” – Elon Musk
71. “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.” – Elon Musk
72. “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.” – Elon Musk
73. “I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.” – Elon Musk
74. “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
75. “One of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask. Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy.” – Elon Musk
76. “Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive, and determination of the people behind it as the product they sell.” – Elon Musk
77. “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.” – Elon Musk
78. “You have to say, ‘Well, why did it succeed where others did not?’” – Elon Musk
79. “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.” – Elon Musk
80. “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.” – Elon Musk
81. “I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time-solving engineering and manufacturing problems.” – Elon Musk
82. “As a child, I hated being alone. As an adult, I don’t want to be alone. It makes one really miserable.” – Elon Musk
83. “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.” – Elon Musk
84. “I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.” – Elon Musk
85. “That’s my lesson for taking a vacation. Vacation will kill you.” – Elon Musk
86. “I’ve actually not read any books on time management.” – Elon Musk
87. “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.” – Elon Musk
88. “As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies.” – Elon Musk
89. “(Physics is) a good framework for thinking. … Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.”
Elon Musk
90. “I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.” – Elon Musk
91. “I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.” – Elon Musk
92. “Whenever there’s something that affects the public good, then there does need to be some form of public oversight” – Elon Musk
93. “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
94. “We can’t have like willy-nilly proliferation of fake news, that’s crazy. You can’t have more types of fake news than real news. That’s allowing public deception to go unchecked. That’s crazy.” – Elon Musk
95. “I tried hard not to be the CEO at Tesla, but I had to or it would die.” – Elon Musk
96. “They were building a Ferrari for every launch, when it was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick.” – Elon Musk
97. “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.” – Elon Musk
98. “Constantly think about how you could be doing things better.” – Elon Musk
99. “I take the position that I’m always to some degree wrong, and the aspiration is to be less wrong.” – Elon Musk
100. “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
101. “If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed” – Elon Musk
102. “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
103. “My motivation for all my companies has been to be involved in something that I thought would have a significant impact on the world.” – Elon Musk
104. “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
105. “What makes innovative thinking happen?… I think it’s really a mindset. You have to decide.” – Elon Musk
106. “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.” – Elon Musk
107. “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.” – Elon Musk
108. “Disruptive technology where you really have a big technology discontinuity… tends to come from new companies.” – Elon Musk
109. “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.” – Elon Musk
110. “I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.” – Elon Musk Quotes
111. “Going from PayPal, I thought: ‘Well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?’ Not from the perspective, ‘What’s the best way to make money?” – Elon Musk
112. “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?’”
Elon Musk
113. “Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? And if the future’s not including being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, it’s incredibly depressing if that’s not the future we’re going to have.” – Elon Musk
114. “Don’t delude yourself into thinking something’s working when it’s not, or you’re gonna get fixated on a bad solution.” – Elon Musk
115. “I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” – Elon Musk
116. “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.” – Elon Musk
117. “Don’t be afraid of new arenas.” – Elon Musk Quotes
118. “Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success.” – Elon Musk
119. “When you struggle with a problem, that’s when you understand it.” – Elon Musk
120. “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
121. “The tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but […] once you do that, the rest is really easy.” – Elon Musk
122. “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.” – Elon Musk
123. “I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents” – Elon Musk
124. “Don’t confuse schooling with education. I didn’t go to Harvard but the people that work for me did.” – Elon Musk
125. “If humanity is to become multi-planetary, the fundamental breakthrough that needs to occur in rocketry is a rapidly and completely reusable rocket … achieving it would be on a par with what the Wright brothers did. It’s the fundamental thing that’s necessary for humanity to become a space-faring civilization. America would never have been colonized if ships weren’t reusable.” – Elon Musk
126. “Stop being patient and start asking yourself, how do I accomplish my 10-year plan in 6 months? You will probably fail but you will be a lot further ahead of the person who simply accepted it was going to take 10 years.” – Elon Musk
127. “If you punish people too much for failure, then they will respond accordingly and the innovation you will get will be very incrementalist. Nobody’s going to try anything bold for fear of getting fired or punished in some way. The risk/reward must be balanced, in favor of making bold moves.” – Elon Musk
128. “Working hard to make useful products & services for your fellow humans is deeply morally good.” – Elon Musk
129. “Never chase the next hot thing. Stop trying to chase the wave. You will never catch it. You always for the most part find out about that stuff too late. Instead, do what you are really passionate about, what you really love. That will position you before the wave even hits, and you will find out about whatever it is before the wave starts before it gets hot, and that is how you take advantage.” – Elon Musk
130. “There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future?” – Elon Musk
131. “If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules.” – Elon Musk
132. “At SpaceX, we specialize in converting things from impossible to late.” – Elon Musk
133. “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.” – Elon Musk
134. “The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment.” – Elon Musk
135. “Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication […] No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.” – Elon Musk
136. “I wonder how many dead one-planet civilizations are out there in the cosmos that never made it to the other planet and ultimately extinguished themselves or were destroyed by external factors. Probably a few.” – Elon Musk Quotes
137. “Possessions weigh you down.” – Elon Musk
138. “To anyone I’ve offended I just wanna say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship…Did you also think I was gonna be a chill normal dude?” – Elon Musk
139. “A beautiful thing about Twitter is how it empowers citizen journalism – people are able to disseminate news without an establishment bias” – Elon Musk
140. “I will not let you down, no matter what it takes.” – Elon Musk
Watch This Motivational Video On Elon Musk
I hope these motivational quotes from Elon Musk made you question many things in life and must have inspired you to achieve bigger dreams.
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