Elon Musk
179 quotes
Biography
"Life is too short for long-term grudges."
"It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to."
"I think the Internet is the super-set of all media. It is the be-all and the end-all of all media. One will see print, broadcast, arguably, radio, essentially all media folding into the Internet."
"If things aren't not failing you are not innovating enough."
"I didn’t really expect to make any money. If I could make enough to cover the rent and buy some food that would be fine. As it turns out, it turned out to be quite valuable in the end."
"I think South Africa is a great country."
"If you wanted to be close to the cutting edge, particularly in technology, you came to North America."
"Tuition costs are outrageous. Fortunately, they gave me a scholarship…so I only had to cover living expenses, books, etc., by working."
"One was the Internet, one was clean energy and one was space."
"I could either watch it happen, or be part of it."
"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."
"The answer was we thought it could be done."
"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."
"Falcon One is going to be the lowest cost per flight to orbit of any production rocket."
"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."
"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."
"Well, I have tried to learn as much as possible from prior attempts."
"If nothing else, we are committed to failing in a new way."
"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."
"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."
"I think the rocket business is quite cyclic. There are a great many peaks and troughs."
"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?"
"When thinking about starting a business, I think it’s actually better to start in a trough and come to market in a peak, than the other way around. Frankly, if anything does, and it’s almost cliché, space has a long-term future."
"I want to be able to make sure that we have enough capital to survive at least three consecutive failures. If you want to make a small fortune in the launch vehicle business, start with a large one."
"The long term ultimate objective – the holy grail – is we would like to help make life multi-planetary."