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I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

Elon Musk

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Elon Musk
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: June 28
Actor
Aerospace Engineer
Engineer
Entrepreneur
Inventor
Investor
Programmer
Pretoria
South Africa
Elon Reeve Musk
Elon R. Musk
Elon R Musk
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More quotes by Elon Musk

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If you go back 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
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What I'm trying to do is to maximise the probability of the future being better.
Elon Musk
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Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.
Elon Musk
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I'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power, and most likely a majority... in less than 20 years.
Elon Musk
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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.
Elon Musk
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In the case of Apple, they did originally do production internally, but then along came unbelievably good outsourced manufacturing from companies like Foxconn. We don't have that in the rocket business. There's no Foxconn in the rocket business.
Elon Musk
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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
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When we got Tesla going at the very beginning, if you asked me what I thought the odds of success were, I would have said less than 50%. I would have said that failure is the most likely outcome.
Elon Musk
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You could power the entire United States with about 150 to 200 square kilometers of solar panels, the entire United States. Take a corner of Utah... there's not much going on there, I've been there. There's not even radio stations.
Elon Musk
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There's a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.
Elon Musk
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Does the logic connect? What are the range of probably outcomes? You want to figure out what those probabilities are and ideally be the House. It's fine to gamble, as long as you're the House. Also, listen to critical feedback, particularly from friends. Generally they will be thinking it but they won't tell you.
Elon Musk
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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
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The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far - the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.
Elon Musk
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Funded by the government just means funded by the people. Government, by the way, has no money. It only takes money from the people. Sometimes people forget that that's really what occurs.
Elon Musk
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Fear is a hard thing to deal with. I feel it quite strongly. If I think something is important enough, I'll make myself do it in spite of fear. But it can really sap the will. I hate fear, I wish I had it less.
Elon Musk
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Don't be afraid of new arenas.
Elon Musk
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It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don't think it's possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.
Elon Musk
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It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.
Elon Musk
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I think there are more politicians in favor of electric cars than against. There are still some that are against, and I think the reasoning for that varies depending on the person, but in some cases, they just don't believe in climate change - they think oil will last forever.
Elon Musk
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I want to make rockets 100 times, if not 1,000 times better. The ultimate objective is to make humanity a multiplanet species. Thirty years from now, there'll be a base on the moon and on Mars, and people will be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets.
Elon Musk