Elon Musk Quotes

businessman and entrepreneur (born 1971)

Elon Reeve Musk (born 28 June 1971) is a South African-born entrepreneur and business magnate resident in the United States. He is the founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer at SpaceX; early-stage investor, CEO, and Product Architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; president of the Musk Foundation; and owner of X Corp., formerly known as Twitter, Inc. With an estimated net worth of about US$487.3 billion as of October 2025, Musk is the wealthiest person in the world according to the Bloomberg billionaires index and the Forbes real-time billionaires list.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: Elon Reeve Musk

Alternative Names: Elon R. Musk • Elon R Musk • Musk

From Wikidata (CC0)

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.

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.

We need to figure out how to have the things we love, and not destroy the world.

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.

The heroes of the books I read, The Lord of the Rings and the Foundation series, always felt a duty to save the world.

Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond our little blue mud ball--or go extinct.

It was obviously a big disappointment not to reach orbit on this flight ... The most important message I’d like to send right now is that SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward. We have flight four of Falcon 1 almost ready for flight and flight five right behind that. ... There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport. For my part, I will never give up and I mean never.

As life’s agents, it’s on our shoulders.

I’m nauseatingly pro-American. It is where great things are possible.

This is the chance to fulfill a dream.

If you have millions of dollars it changes your lifestyle, and anyone who says differently is talking bullshit. I don’t need to work, from a standard of living point of view, but I do, you know. I work every day and on weekends and I haven’t taken a vacation for years.

Although I am new in the business, my team is not. I would say that, person for person, there has never been a better rocket company in existence, in history. I don’t think there has ever been a group this talented in one place, in one company, developing a rocket – ever.

We're adding a triple sign-off for all work done on the launch pad, on flight components, and flight critical GSE. You have a technician, a responsible engineer, and then quality assurance will sign the final, record all information, and take photographs of all the work that was done, and then make sure that all information is put into our quality assurance database, which is reviewed prior to launch.

I think that is a mistake and results in cloudy judgment on important technical issues. They can't tell if something is really good or not, so they just do what everyone else does, assuming it to be the safe bet.

Rocket engineering is not like ditch digging. With ditch digging you can get 100 people and dig a ditch, and you will dig it a hundred times as faster if you get 100 people versus one. With rockets, you have to solve the problem of a particular level of difficulty; one person who can solve the problem is worth an infinite number of people who can’t.