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

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Imagine creating a huge software program that can only be tested in little pieces on a computer that is slightly different from what it is supposed to run on. However, when you do run it as a whole on the actual computer for the first time, it must run almost flawlessly without a single significant bug. When is the last time you saw a software program do that?

I think the rocket business is quite cyclic. There are a great many peaks and troughs.

I think we’ve got the risks pretty well characterized. I think we are at least avoiding the mistakes that have been made in the past.

There’s a graveyard of prior attempts, a big graveyard. There’s probably some freshly dug graves just waiting to be filled. Our aspiration is to avoid that destination.

If nothing else, we are committed to failing in a new way.

Well, I have tried to learn as much as possible from prior attempts.

I think the reason it’s cheaper is, first of all, we are a private entity and we have a very lean system in here. What we have been able to do here at SpaceX is to cherry-pick, you know, the top one or two percent and give them, you know, capital to execute well and a clear mission, which is low cost, reliable access to space, and no other constraints.

Which means we’re cheaper than the Chinese, cheaper than [the] Russians or anywhere else – and we’re doing it in the United States with American labour costs.

Falcon One is going to be the lowest cost per flight to orbit of any production rocket.

There is nothing inherently expensive about rockets. It's just that those who have built and operated them in the past have done so with horrendously poor efficiency.

The answer was we thought it could be done.

We could figure out ways with small aerospace companies to do a low-cost spacecraft and lander. But we could not find a way to do a low-cost launcher, unless we went to the Russians.

I could either watch it happen, or be part of it.

One was the Internet, one was clean energy and one was space.

Tuition costs are outrageous. Fortunately, they gave me a scholarship…so I only had to cover living expenses, books, etc., by working.