Quotes from Elon Musk

Say what you want about me, but I acquired the world’s largest non-profit for $44B lol [Twitter joke]

An ideal air conditioner should optimize temperature & humidity, while filtering out particulate & pathogens. [Musk has mentioned Tesla building a HVAC system in the future]

Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. It is a fundamental defense against autocracy & statism, which is why we must fight so hard to preserve it. The founders showed great wisdom, based on painful historical lessons, in passing the First Amendment.

Commercial airlines in the US are much safer per mile traveled than trains (or cars).

A big part of the problem is that journalists used to choose their career to pursue truth, but in recent years many have entered journalism to be activists.

Sorry for showing you so many irrelevant & annoying ads on Twitter! We’re taking the (obvious) corrective action of tying ads to keywords & topics in tweets, like Google does with search. This will improve contextual relevance dramatically.

The amount of solar energy received by Earth could power a civilization over 100 times larger than ours!

Low birth rates lead to ghost cities and, eventually, ghost civilizations.

I'm a big believer in: don't ask investors to invest their money if you're not prepared to invest your money.

What is the purpose of universities at this point? I think it's mostly just to hang out with peers, have some fun, and talk to your friends.

Money, in my view, is essentially an information system for labor allocation, so it has no power in and of itself; it's like a database for guiding people as to what they should do.

In the United States especially, there's an overallocation of talent in finance and law... We should have, I think, fewer people doing law and fewer people doing finance and more people making stuff.

When trying different things, you got to have some acceptance of failure... Failure must be an option. If failure is not an option, it's going to result in extremely conservative choices and you may get something even worse than lack of innovation, things may go backwards.

This may sound corny, but love is the answer.

It's way easier to be mean on social media than it is to be mean in person.

I think people should be nicer to each other and give more credit to others and don't assume that they're mean until you know they're actually mean. It's easy to demonize people; you're usually wrong about it. People are nicer than you think.

That's generally my advice to people, try to be useful. It is very difficult to be useful to others. To do a genuinely useful thing to others, that's what we should all be trying to do. And it's very difficult.

We want to maximize happiness to the population and propagate into the future as far as possible and understand the nature of reality. And from that, I think everything else follows.

Something that can be helpful is fatalism, to some degree. If you just accept the probabilities, then that diminishes fear.

What I find ironic about a lot of the naysayers is that the very same people will transition from saying it was impossible to saying it was obvious.

Focus is incredibly important. If you have a certain amount of resources to the degree that you diffuse your focus, you impede your ability to execute.

Of anything in my life, I would say kids by far make me the happiest.

You're not going to create revolutionary cars or rockets on 40 hours a week. It just won't work. Colonizing Mars isn't going to happen on 40 hours a week.

[SpaceX joke] “When people ask me why I started a rocket company, I say, ‘I was trying to learn how to turn a large fortune into a small one.’

The United States is a nation of explorers. The United States is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration…

The probable lifespan of human civilization is much greater if we are a multi-planet species as opposed to a single planet species. If we are a single planet species, then eventually there will be some extinction event, either from humans or some natural thing.

A small group of very technically strong people will always beat a large group of moderately strong people.

I think it's incredibly important that you have an environment in general where people look forward to coming to work because it's just so much easier to work hard if you love what you're doing.

[on the CEO position] “There's no point in spending your time on things that are going right, so you only spend your time on things that are going wrong... I think you have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold.

We are all chimps. We're one notch above a chimp.

People learn and are interested in different things at different paces. You really want to disconnect the whole grade level thing from the subjects. Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can…

Do you have the right axioms, are they relevant, and are you making the right conclusions based on these axioms? That's the essence of critical thinking, and yet it is amazing how often people fail to do that.

[on his favorite teacher] “We had to work like the house was on fire for the first half of the lesson and do extra homework, but then we got to hear stories of when he was a soldier in WWII. If you didn't do the work, you didn't get to hear the stories. Everybody did the work.

I came to the conclusion that the more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, the better we’re able to answer the questions, or ask the questions, to understand the nature of the universe. So therefore, we want to expand the scope and scale of consciousness.

2008 [was] not a good time to be a car company, especially a startup company, and especially an electric car company. That was like stupidity squared.

I wanted to be where I could have an impact on technology... Or be involved in the creation of new technology, so that's what prodded me to go, at first, Canada... And then ultimately, to the US.

[on not adhering to billionaire 'standards'] I don't even own a home right now... I basically just rotate though friends' spare bedrooms.

When I was, I don't know, 5 or 6 or something, I thought I was insane… because it was clear that other people… their minds weren't exploding with ideas all the time.

I have made it a principle within Tesla that we should never attempt to make servicing a profit center. It does not seem right to me that companies try to make a profit off customers when their product breaks.

I think that we really need to think of intelligence as really not being uniquely confined to humans. And that the potential of intelligence in computers is far greater than in biology.

I was asked recently, what period of history would I prefer to be at the most and my answer was 'Right now.' This is the most interesting time in history and I read a lot of history.

I thought the internet would be something that would fundamentally change the nature of humanity.” And in a separate interview discussing the internet: “It was like humanity gaining a nervous system.

[discussing memory] If you can say why something is relevant, you will probably remember it. Your brain is basically constantly trying to forget everything as much as possible because it's hard to store memories.

Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic.

Honestly, I really am just trying to do the most amount of good with a time that I have on this Earth. And, you know, not always succeeding, but that's the goal.

Our view of reality is always wrong, just a question of how wrong.

You should take the approach that you’re wrong. That you the entrepreneur are wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

[on how to innovate at your company] Establish an expectation of innovation and the compensation structure must reflect that… There must also be an allowance of failure.

For the first people that go to Mars it's gonna be like 'dangerous, you might die, food probably not good, it's gonna be a long and difficult trip, probably a lot of pain and danger' That's the ad. But in the end, it's going to be a glorious adventure.

I can sometimes be optimistic about schedules.

[recalling a date with a woman in college] “She said the first thing I asked her was ‘Do you ever think about electric cars?’ No, she never did… recently it’s been more effective [laughs]

[speaking about time after college] “Now is the time to risk. You don’t have kids... As you get older your obligations increase and once you have a family you start taking risk not just for yourself but for your family as well, it gets much harder to do things...

New technology should have a spotlight on it, but it shouldn't have a laser on it.

A good sign as to whether there is free speech is, is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like? If that is the case, we have free speech.

The duty of a leader is to serve their people, not for the people to serve them.

There’s no need to even have a college degree at all, or even high school… if somebody graduated from a great university, that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things but it’s not necessarily the case.

America is a nation of explorers. People came here from other parts of the world that chose to give up the known in favor of the unknown.

Decentralized crypto is an attempt to wrest power of currency dilution (pernicious form of taxation) & capital controls from governments. That said, I sure hope the cure is better than the disease!

All news sources are partially propaganda, some more than others.

People should pursue what they're passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

[discussing early Tesla days] “Alternate name for our company was Faraday, who invented the electric motor, whereas Nikola Tesla invented the AC induction motor.

You don’t have a soul, you are a soul.

Don’t build moats, build tech trees.

Accept worst case outcome & assign it a probability, which is usually very low. Now think of good things in life & assign them probabilities – many are certain! Bringing anxiety/fear to the conscious mind saps it of limbic emotional strength Cheery fatalism is very effective.

I am accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary & extend the light of consciousness to the stars.

The degree to which the unions control the Dems is insane. It’s like watching a sock puppet “talk”, but the hand inside the sock is way too obvious!

Interestingly, however, average power density of the sun is comparable to a compost heap (humans are more power dense than the sun) – it is just very, very big.

SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and The Boring Company are philanthropy. If you say philanthropy is love of humanity, they ARE philanthropy.

Goal of government should be to maximize the happiness of the people. Giving each person money allows them to decide what meets their needs, rather than the blunt tool of legislation, which creates self-serving special interests.

Children are essential to the future.

[on memory] In order to remember something, you must assign meaning to it.

We're a pattern of molecules that can talk, think, and feel.

[on potential of solar power] So much empty land & only a tiny percentage needed to power entire country!

Our consciousness is like a small candle in a vast darkness and we must not let that small candle go out.

[on evolution] If you leave hydrogen out long enough, it starts talking to itself.

[on Mars environment] You'll be living in glass domes and partially underground, so it will be hard living in the beginning on Mars, not like some luxury situation.

[priorities on Mars] The first thing you gotta do is build a base. That base would have the essentials of food production and water. Have ice mining droids... and you need a propellant factory.

[on warming up Mars] You could use solar reflectors or create artificial suns with a series of thermonuclear explosions.

If we want to go out there and make sci-fi real, be on other planets and go back to the moon, then we need big rockets.

Most people in the corporate world really try to conform to some sort of behavioral thing that makes them seem like an android, drone, or some NPC in a videogame with a limited dialogue tree.

We're a pattern of molecules, the actual atoms in our body change.

My proceeds from PayPal were $180m. I put $100m in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.

Making life multiplanetary expands the scope & scale of consciousness. It also enables us to backup the biosphere, protecting all life as we know it from a calamity on Earth. Humanity is life’s steward, as no other species can transport life to Mars. We can’t let them down.

Marginal cost of Starship mass to orbit should be well under $100/kg. Fully burdened cost depends on flight rate.

It’s either traffic forever or tunnels.

Pop music has both literal & figurative Stockholm Syndrome.

Read The Story of Civilization by Will & Ariel Durant

There is a profound difference between single-planet & multiplanet species. If we are able to visit other stars one day, we may discover many long-dead single-planet civilizations.

Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.

The thing that drives me is that I want to think about the future and feel good about that… that we’re doing what we can to have the future be as good as possible, to be inspired by what is likely to happen and to look forward to the next day.

Neuralink won’t overclock the brain, it will transfer processing to the supercomputer extension of your brain. This is basically what you do when you use a smartphone or computer, but a Neuralink will have orders of magnitude faster input & output, especially latter.

Since I’ve been asked a lot: Buy stock in several companies that make products & services that *you* believe in. Only sell if you think their products & services are trending worse. Don’t panic when the market does. This will serve you well in the long-term.

We will make super efficient home hvac with hepa filters one day.

Banks are basically balkanized, heterogeneous databases with high latency & weak security, especially ACH transfers & credit cards.

Use of the word “billionaire” as a pejorative is morally wrong & dumb. If the reason for it is building products that make millions of people happy.

Who controls the memes, controls the Universe

Will those who write the algorithms ever realize their negativity bias?

If you’re a CEO of a company, you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company. There’s no point in spending time on things that are going right, so you only spend your time on things that are going wrong.

Most news outlets attempt to answer the question: “What are the worst things happening on Earth today?” It’s a big planet! Obviously, some bad things are happening somewhere at any given time, but focusing relentlessly on those does not give an accurate picture of reality.

Countries should be increasing nuclear power generation! It is insane from a national security standpoint & bad for the environment to shut them down.

On advice of a good friend, I’ve been fasting periodically & feel healthier.

Didn’t occur to founders of USA that people would live so long, so they put in age minimums (for wisdom), but not age maximums (for … 😴).

Education is the path out of poverty and Internet access enables education.

Do not let ancient grudge break to new mutiny.

War always gives ample reason for vengeance for all sides. Only by overcoming this instinct can there be peace.

The point of AI Day is to show the immense depth & breadth of Tesla in AI, compute hardware & robotics.

SpaceX now delivering about twice as much payload to orbit as rest of world combined.

My son, Saxon, was amazed that so many paper newspapers are still produced every day. He said they probably just search the Internet & print it out. Yup, with rare exception, that is *actually* what they do haha.

Starlink now over 1M user terminals manufactured.

Fully reusable orbital rockets are the fundamental breakthrough needed for humanity to become a multiplanet species.

Should be Alexander the Greatest. After all, is there a better Alexander?

Starlink is meant for peaceful use only. To help mend the fault in our stars.

Won’t be long before we view gasoline cars the same way we view steam engines today.

The residual value of gasoline cars bought today will be much lower than people think.

Socrates can be a little boring tbh.

Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.

The course of civilization is not always upward.

Almost all of Earth’s energy comes from the sun already – we would be a dark iceball at near absolute zero if not for the sun. And essentially the entire ecosystem is solar-powered. Civilization uses a tiny amount of energy by comparison. Not hard to generate from wind/solar.

To be clear, I support the left half of the Republican Party and the right half of the Democratic Party!

There are no coincidences.

The ratio of digital to biological compute is growing fast. Worth tracking.

[on himself having kids] “Trying to set a good example haha. Mars needs people!

Due to lower gravity, you can travel from surface of Mars to surface of Earth fairly easily with a single stage rocket. Earth to Mars is vastly harder.

Many in America don't realize how proud they should be of the legal system. Not perfect, but nowhere is the cause of justice better served.

Some people think that having fewer kids is better for the environment. Environment's gonna be fine even if we doubled the population. Japan had lowest birth rate. Having kids is essential for maintaining civilization. We can't let civilization dwindle into nothing.

Most people in the world are operating under the false impression that we've got too many people. This is not true. Earth could maintain a population many times the current level. The birth rate has been dropping like crazy.

At Tesla we’ve never spent any money on advertising, we put all the money into R&D, manufacturing and design to try to make the car as good as possible.

Should prob articulate philosophy underlying my actions. It’s pretty simple & mostly influenced by Douglas Adams & Isaac Asimov.

Some people use meditation or yoga to calm their mind at the end of the day, but video games on hardcore mode work best for me.

The point of companies is products & services. They have no point in & of themselves, nor do these indices. Buy & hold stock in companies where you love the product roadmap, sell where you don’t.

We must pass The Great Filter.

Has anyone seen web3? I can’t find it.

I think people can choose to be not ordinary. You know, they can choose to not necessarily conform to the conventions that were taught to them by their parents.

Do everything you can to gather great people if you're creating a company.

Large incumbent carmakers sell their cars at low to zero true margin. Most of their profit is selling replacement parts to their fleet, of which 70% to 80% are past warranty. Like razors & blades. New car companies lack this advantage. Also lack sales & service infrastructure.

Prototypes are easy, production is hard.

Becoming multiplanetary is one of the greatest filters. Only now, 4.5 billion years after Earth formed, is it possible. How long this window to reach Mars remains open is uncertain. Perhaps a long time, perhaps not. In case it is the latter, we should act now.

So much of AI is about compressing reality to a small vector space, like a video game in reverse. Physics formulas are the rendering rules.

I’ve spent more than half my life in California & love the state. But, frankly, I think CA has the winning-for-too-long problem. Like a sports team with many championships, it is increasingly difficult to avoid complacency & a sense of entitlement.

People learn and are interested in different things at different paces. So, you really want to disconnect the whole grade-level thing from the subjects. Allow people to progress at the fastest pace they can.

Terraforming will be too slow to be relevant in our lifetime. However, we can establish a human base there in our lifetime. At least a future spacefaring civilization – discovering our ruins – will be impressed humans got that far.

Government is just a monopolist corporation in the limit.

Recessions serve a vital economic cleansing function.

Why watch it happen instead of helping make it happen?

If your customers love you, your odds of success are dramatically higher.

Smartwatches & phones are yesterday’s technology, Neuralinks are the future.

I’m not a fan of disruption for it’s own sake. I think that if there’s a need for something to be disrupted and it’s important to the future of the world, then sure we should disrupt it.

If somebody graduated from a great university, that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things but it’s not necessarily the case. If you look at say people like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs… these guys didn’t graduate from college.

The most amazing thing about rocket engines is that they *sometimes* don’t blow up! The amount of power going through them boggles the mind.

The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.

Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.

Time is the ultimate currency.

Fermi was awesome. He understood the right questions to ask.

People sometimes forget that a company is just a group of people gathered together to make products. So long as it makes great products, it will have great value.

Realized what I have in common with environmentalists, but also why they’re so annoyingly wrong: They are conservationists of what is, whereas they should be conservationists of our potential over time, our cosmic endowment.

Elevator music is underrated.

Model 3 orders at 180,000 in 24 hours. Selling price w avg option mix prob $42k, so ~$7.5B in a day. Future of electric cars looking bright!

If you’re creating a company or you're joining a company, the most important thing is to attract great people. So, either join a group that’s amazing and you really respect or if you’re building a company you need to gather great people.

Creating a neural lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines.

Some hate humanity, but I love humanity so much.

[discussing Neuralink] “There is already bidirectional communication between human & AI via phones & computers. It’s just lossy & very slow (especially output).

Starship aspires to be the first fully reusable orbital launch vehicle, the holy grail of rocketry. This is the critical breakthrough needed to make life multiplanetary.

If you can’t beat em, join em, Neuralink mission statement

Run a physics sim long enough & you’ll get intelligence.

I’m so dying to do a supersonic, electric VOTL jet, but adding more work will make my 🧠 🧨.

You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems you solve.

[advice for political system on Mars] I suggest no parties and just direct voting by the people of concise laws that everyone can understand.

Tesla policy is never to give in to false claims, even if we would lose, and never to fight true claims, even if we would win.

Population collapse is the biggest threat to civilization.

Solar/wind + batteries + electric cars is obviously the future.

When you’re building something new, there’s going to be mistakes. It’s important to recognize those mistakes, acknowledge them and take corrective action.

To be successful in anything you have to do the tough stuff as well as the enjoyable stuff, you have to do the boring stuff as well as the non-boring stuff.

Defeating traffic is the ultimate boss battle. Even the most powerful humans in the world cannot defeat traffic.

Science is discovering the essential truths about what exists in the Universe, engineering is about creating things that never existed.

Most people have no idea just how good the Tesla air purification system is. Literally 10X better than any other car.

Lots of people I talked to on the production lines at Tesla or building rockets at SpaceX own Doge. They aren’t financial experts or Silicon Valley technologists. That’s why I decided to support Doge – it felt like the people’s crypto.

There are no angels in war.

The smarter someone is, the harder it is to simulate/predict their behavior.

Even GM & Chrysler went bankrupt in 2009. Ford and Tesla are the only US car companies that have avoided bankruptcy.

Chairs are underappreciated.

Asteroid impact risk is well understood, but not comets. Those worry me.

Starship will be an incredible enabler for science. Full reusability & high production rate drive several orders of magnitude improvement in $/kg to orbit & beyond. Next gen Starlink constellation is primary user of this rocket, so science doesn’t need to cover fixed cost.

Consciousness, civilization as we know it is extremely rare and a very precious thing. Our consciousness is like a small candle in a vast darkness. And we must not let that small candle go out

If people are going to dislike me, I’d prefer they do so for what I’ve actually done.

However, I also think that Tesla has the potential to be the most valuable company ever. When Tesla’s market cap, making sustainable energy products, exceeds that of Aramco, producing fossil fuels, you know the future will be good for Earth.

It is hard to overstate criticality of reusable rockets. No less important than reusable aircraft, cars or bicycles. Essential for humanity to become a multiplanet species & backup the biosphere.

If you can establish a tax on carbon, no incentives or subsidies would be necessary because the market system would work as it should. I am a big believer in the market system. The market system is just the collective will of the people.

Frankly, when starting a company I would advise people to have a high pain tolerance.

To be clear, I am *not* an investor, I am an engineer. I don’t even own any publicly traded stock besides Tesla. However, when fiat currency has negative real interest, only a fool wouldn’t look elsewhere. Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money. The key word is 'almost.'

In any argument... you want to make sure that the underlying premises are valid and applicable, and then when reaching a conclusion, the conclusion you’re reaching is necessarily driven by the underlying premises and the interconnection between those premises.

[on solar energy] “That free fusion reactor in the sky conveniently converts ~4 million tons of mass into energy every second. We just need to catch an extremely tiny amount of it to power all of civilization.

The future is a set of branching probability streams. Some actions by humanity have an extremely leveraged effect on shape & size of those streams.

We are going to great lengths to avoid the Wikipedia left wing editorial control problem. By the same token, Community Notes cannot be biased towards the right either. Maximizing for truth is the goal.

Twitter is the source of truth.

If companies post interesting or entertaining content, they will gain an audience rapidly.

I am super pro Ukraine, but relentless escalation is very risky for Ukraine and the world.

Major Twitter improvement we just released is that you can now bookmark tweets from tweet details page. Importantly, bookmarks are *private*, unlike likes. No one other than you can see your bookmarks

Teslas are the safest cars on the road, but most people don’t know that.

Even if you tax every billionaire in America at 100%, it barely makes a dent in the national debt. In the end, the government will be forced to tax everyone to pay the debt.

Twitter is arguably already the least wrong source of truth on the Internet, but we obviously still have a long way to go. Enabling CommunityNotes to operate at very large scale and providing maximum transparency about how Twitter works are fundamental to building trust.

I think generally people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis.

The peer-enforced sameness of thought in most of the media is troubling.

Peak oil demand probably happens within the next 5 years.

[on immigration] It is super important to keep ace players in the United States. Forcing them to work for other countries is so crazy.

Fed rate increases make cars more expensive for consumers, increasing the difficulty level for automotive companies.

People can disguise their own morality, but not that of their friends. Birds of a feather…

To be clear, I’m not someone who thinks lots of government agencies should be abolished (maybe a few), but we should always question our institutions, as this strengthens the bedrock of democracy.

WEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want.

Media want to control what you know, which is why citizen journalism is essential.

How is it possible that copycat propaganda is published simultaneously on so many legacy media channels? That is the question you should be asking.

Citizen journalism is vital to the future of civilization.

Would be great if someone could compile a game contest of who said the craziest stuff between 4chan and WEF! My money is on the latter.

Companies in general are missing the incredible opportunity that Twitter provides to reach customers. Just Tweet interesting things! That’s all it takes.

Population collapse is an existential problem for humanity, not overpopulation!

Government data has far more latency & error than people think, which is why it’s so frequently restated, especially in a rapidly changing economy. When the economy is not changing rapidly, actually measuring things isn’t important, as you can simply extrapolate from the past.

How is WEF/Davos even a thing? Are they trying to be the boss of Earth!?

Increasing quality of life for the aged is important, but increased lifespan, especially if cognitive impairment is not addressed, is not good for civilization. We are already ruled by a gerontocracy!

Sea water contains enough of every element to support >10X current civilizational needs.

Nuclear is way safer than coal.

I’m pro vaccines in general, but there’s a point where the cure/vaccine is potentially worse, if administered to the whole population, than the disease.

Starship, with its voluminous cargo bay, will enable incredible space telescopes for astronomy.

The higher the rates, the harder the fall.

Ironically, the company that made the first commercially viable internal combustion engine car [Daimler] saved the company that made the first commercially viable electric car! [Tesla]

Easier to argue that global warming is a risk (rather than a certainty), but it is foolish to roll those dice, given that we will eventually run out of fossil fuels and have to generate energy sustainably anyway.

There will probably be far more robots than humans in the future.

Adderall is just low-grade speed & greatly amplifies your inner a**hole!

Some things that your party tells you are false and some things that the other party says are true.

We will strive to increase the joy of Twitter!

If you don’t think there’s at least a tiny chance you’re an NPC … you’re an NPC.

The woke mind virus is penetrating the firewalls of some of the world’s smartest meat computers at a prodigious rate!

I don’t think we should divide issues semi-randomly into “left” and “right” tribes, as it inhibits critical thinking. The idea that there are too many people generally stems from the axiomatic flaw that Earth’s environment can’t sustain its current population.

To assess if a drug is good, whether legal or illegal, the acid test is being able to say: [blank] made me a better person.

I am not endorsing drugs, but I am saying that the evidence suggests that banning them is a net societal negative.

Being pro humanity is speciesist!

Two of the worst possible curses: * You will live forever * You can have anything you want

There are ~2300 active, working employees at Twitter. There are still hundreds of employees working on trust & safety, along with several thousand contractors. Less than 10 people from my other companies are working at Twitter.

We’re mining and burning trillions of tons of hydrocarbons that used to be buried very deep underground and now we’re sticking them in the atmosphere and running this crazy chemical experiment on the atmosphere.

[on fusion power] We already have a giant, free fusion reactor in the sky called the sun. Just catch it’s energy with PV, store in battery & you’re pretty much done.

Business or personal, wishful thinking causes a lot of trouble. You really have to ascertain whether something is true or not, does it make sense, and if it ever feels like it’s too easy. it probably is.

I’ve made several hiring decisions in the past where I valued intellect over heart and I think that was a mistake.

Work hard like every waking hour. That’s the thing I would say, particularly if you’re starting a company.

As long as there is not something that is causing an error in the pricing system, as there is because of the unpriced externality which is the CO2 capacity of the oceans and atmosphere, the market system works very well.

Politics is a sadness generator.

The limbic instinct for vengeance is incredibly strong, which is why turn the other cheek is such a powerful idea. As it ends the cycle of retribution.

All a company is is a group of people who have gathered together to create a product or service. Depending upon how talented and hardworking that group is and the degree to which they are focused… that will determine the success of the company.

Great differences in technology exist in the world about which even hardcore technologists are unaware.

What really matters for the longevity of civilization is making life multiplanetary on a sustained basis.

You should not only not shut down the nuclear power plants, but you should reopen the ones that have been already shut down. Those are the fastest to produce energy. It's crazy to shut down nuclear power plants now. Total madness

Nothing can escape gravity, not even black holes (and they really tried!)

Tunnels are the solution to traffic. You can have as many levels as you want. Usable tunnel depth far exceeds tallest buildings, so would work even for New York or Beijing.

Manufacturing is so hard. I have the utmost respect for those who build things.

Funny to think that sapphire is just corroded aluminum!

Interesting to think of physics as a set of compression algorithms for the universe. That's basically what formulas are.

Bringing a new product to volume production is 1% inspiration & 99% perspiration. You do still need that critical seed of inspiration, but it’s fun & takes ~100 people. Production takes >10,000 people & hurts like hell until the gigantic cybernetic collective runs smoothly.

The simplest solution is not necessarily the most satisfying.

Last year, Japan had ~800k births & life expectancy is 85 years (impressively high!), implying future population of only 68M, dropping almost half from current population of 126M. That’s a lot of ghost towns & cities.

There are vast amounts of iron (and lithium) on Earth, but much less nickel. For global industry to scale battery production to ~10 TWh/year, it needs to be mostly iron. Higher energy density of Nickel only needed for very long range vehicles & aircraft.

Am not saying that is *necessarily* good or bad, but reality will force us to live with the consequences of our actions.

If you’re a CEO of a company, you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company… you have a filter for the crappest problems in the company.

[on potential Tesla advertising] “At some point, we should probably do advertising as art/communication/entertainment & to support high quality media.”

I was trying to think, what would most influence the future- what are the problem that we have to solve? I talked a lot to friends and housemates… and dates… which was probably not the best thing…

Such a privilege to work with people I like & respect so much. I feel blessed.

I would definitely advise people who are starting a company to expect a long period of quite a high difficulty.

Focus on signal over noise.

People tend to overweight risk on a personal level. Let’s say you’re young and just coming out of college or coming out of high school... what do you risk? You’re not going to starve.

For sure it'd be very problematic if I were consuming billions of dollars a year in personal consumption, that's not the case. I don't even own a home right now, I'm literally staying at friends' places. I don't have a yacht, I really don't take vacations.

Due to its size & ability to return science instruments even from deep space, Starship will enable a whole new class of science missions.

’ve been working in Boca since Sunday. August heat & humidity in South Texas is intense! If you think of it like a tropical resort, that makes it better though.

[on rocket reuse] “Reuse only matters to degree that it’s rapid & complete.”

Decided to sell my last remaining house. Just needs to go to a large family who will live there. It’s a special place.

I have seen no evidence of an advanced civilization visiting Earth. Fuzzy pics that are worse than a 7/11 security cam frame grab don’t count!

I’ve actually been living in a ~$50k house in south Texas for past 2 years, not Boxabl (cool product tho). Feels more homey to live in a small house.

For any given company, just keep thinking about- are these efforts that people are expending, are they resulting in a better product or service? And if they’re not, stop those efforts.

Our official name is actually Space Exploration Technologies. SpaceX is short form.

Nothing will affect the future of humanity more than digital super-intelligence.

This thing we call “money” is just a (slow, lossy & unsecure) database for labor allocation. Investing is meaningless without people, at least until AGI happens, which will obviate need for labor & necessitate UBI.

There is a reason no fully reusable orbital rocket has been built – it’s an insanely hard problem. Moreover, it must be rapidly & completely reusable (like an airplane). This is the only way to make life multiplanetary. Efficiencies of scale is why Starship is so large.

Interviewer: There's a whole generation coming through that seem really sad about the future. What would you say to them?. Elon Musk: Well, I think if you want the future to be good, you must make it so. Take action to make it good, and it will be.

Physics is simply the search for truth. Nothing is more rigorous.

Embrace tunnels!

Cancel Cancel Culture!

It would appear that the so-called “fringe minority” is actually the government.

Twitter is the least bad public square currently; It really needs to get rid of bots, scammers, etc; It needs to build more trust with users; I would literally put the Twitter algo on GitHub.

[discussing early start up days] The website was up during the day and I was coding at night, seven days a week, all the time. I sort of briefly had a girlfriend in that period and in order to be with me she would have to sleep in the office.

The “critics” seek not to critique, but rather to virtue signal. They are out of touch with the people and so lose their credibility with the people.

As a reminder, I’m in *favor* of universal basic income.

Moral condemnation used not for morality, but as a weapon for manipulation is messed up.

The government has the most money by far. They talk in trillions.

I find it more helpful to read/follow individual journalists, rather than publications. Any given publication is going to have wide range of views, albeit vast majority of stories about any subject are negative, perhaps reflecting innate human biases. Citizen journalism FTW!

The main value of college used to be hanging out, having pseudo intellectual conversations & partying with people your own age. Now, even that’s gone.

70 is currently the age when you receive maximum social security benefits. In other words, that’s when the govt concludes that you can’t hold a job!!

I do love NASA, always have.

Mass to orbit is the fundamental metric for making life multiplanetary.

Minimizing $/ton to the surface of Mars is the fundamental optimization.

I strongly believe that all managers in a technical area must be technically excellent. Managers in software must write great software or it’s like being a cavalry captain who can’t ride a horse!

Humanity did not evolve to mourn the unborn. But we should. I’m talking about not having kids in the first place. That’s the problem.

When you first start a company there’s lots of optimism and things are great… then you encounter all sorts of issues and happiness will steadily decline... eventually if you succeed and in most cases you will not… after a long time you will get back to happiness.

Climate change deniers claim scientists disagree, same rebuttal used by tobacco industry about lung cancer for decades.

To be super clear, I don't wish to (nor could I) mandate anything about a Mars Colony. Am just working on the tech to get people there.

It’s not like I like failure, who likes failure? It’s terrible. But if you only do things that are certain to succeed, you’re only going to be doing very obvious things.

Essentially. Long-term purpose of my Tesla stock is to help make life multiplanetary to ensure it’s continuance. The massive capital needs are in 10 to 20 years. By then, if we’re fortunate, Tesla’s goal of accelerating sustainable energy & autonomy will be mostly accomplished.

If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability / liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starlink & Starship, then bankruptcy, while still unlikely, is not impossible. GM & Chrysler went BK last recession. ‘Only the paranoid survive.’ – Grove

Over time, since we give all employees shares, my ownership is diluted automatically. From the first financing round, where I owned ~60% of Tesla to today at ~20%, it has declined by a factor of 3.

I started The Boring Company as a joke, but now it’s digging real tunnels!

Once the board was presented with the evidence of Eberhard’s deception/fraud & the dire state of the company, all board members, including those he appointed, voted unanimously to fire him in August 2007.

If you do the simple math and you say OK, if somebody else is working 50 hours and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of a year than the other company.

In an electric future, batteries are as essential to transport as oil is today.

There is something about traditional books of course, but… since I’m traveling so much I often find I’m reading the books on my iPhone (iPhone 4 at the time), which may sound like ‘wow, this is really tiny’ but it’s always with you.

Other companies spend money on advertising & manipulating public opinion, Tesla focuses on the product. I trust the people.

The lesson from “tortoise & hare” is not that tortoises are faster, but rather that hares should not be complacent.

Generally starting a business, I’d say number one is have a high pain threshold. There’s a friend of mine who’s got a good saying which is that starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.

The government should be the referee, but not the player and there shouldn’t be too many referees.

If you like what you’re doing, you think about it even when you’re not working, it’s something that your mind is drawn to and if you don’t like it, you just really can’t make it work I think.

I care a lot about the truth of things and trying to understand the truth of things. I think that’s important.

Wishful thinking is innate in the human brain. You want things to be the way you wish them to be, so you tend to filter information that you shouldn’t filter. That’s the most common flaw that I see.

It’s difficult to do self-analysis… but I think people do not think critically enough. Critical thinking is a skill in short supply. People assume too many things to be true without sufficient basis in that belief.

It is high time there was a carbon tax!

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

Careless negativity (destruction) is much harder than thoughtful positivity (creation).

It’s called the Space “Station”, but it’s actually moving around Earth at ~25 times the speed of sound or ~10 times faster than a rifle bullet.

I… really take the position that I am always to some degree wrong and the aspiration is to be less wrong. We are always to some degree wrong, it doesn’t matter who you are.

Tesla software team is excellent even when compared to the best software companies. This is a big deal, as cars are very much computers on wheels.

A hedge fund that shorts is a shrubbery.

Manufacturing will be Tesla’s long-term competitive strength.

The whole notion of being “left wing” or “right wing” is silly. Almost no one initially agrees with the semi-random collection of policies associated with each wing. They only support those policies *after* they join the left or right mind tribe.

Another government stimulus package is not in the best interests of the people imo.

SpaceX is developing rockets needed to make life multiplanetary — full & rapid reusability at large scale. Even if SpaceX fails in that goal, the rockets will still be most advanced on Earth. Starlink‘s purpose is to provide Internet to the least served & to pay for Mars.

[discussing recruiting] And then also tell me about some of the most difficult problems you’ve worked on and how you solved them… that question I think is very important because the people that really solved the problem, they know exactly how they solved it.

Just wanted to say thanks to all Tesla supporters. I damn well love you.

I love humanity & we should fight for a good future for humanity. We should be optimistic about the future.

The ability to attract and motivate great people is critical to the success of a company because a company is just a group of people that are assembled to create a product or service… People sometimes forget this elementary truth.

On Twitter, likes are rare & criticism is brutal. So hardcore. It’s great.

We are a pattern of ancient atoms.

I am inspired by curiosity. That is what drives me. So let us expand the scope & scale of consciousness so that we may aspire to understand the Universe.

Earth could sustain many times its current human population and the ecosystem would be fine. We definitely don’t have ‘too many people.

[on complexity of Tesla] Yes, the Gigafactory is the hardest & most critical product.

Inflation is the most regressive tax of all, yet is advocated by those who claim to be progressive.

[on first principles thinking] It’s hard to think that way, you can’t think that way about everything- it takes a lot of effort but if you’re trying to do something new it’s the best way to think.

Computers are absurdly more accurate than humans. How long would it take for a human to render even one frame of a modern video game at low res? The computer will do high res at 120 frames per second. Not a contest.

When thinking about deep time, what is more astounding is to think about how much time is ahead!

I seem to have a high innate drive and that’s been true even since I was a little kid… I did all sorts of risky things as a kid, like why did I do those things? They’re crazy.

The thing we call money is just an information system for labor allocation. What actually matters is making goods & providing services. We should look at currencies from an information theory standpoint. Whichever has least error & latency will win.

Most people in the world are operating under the false impression that we've got too many people. This is not true. Earth could maintain a population many times the current level. The birth rate has been dropping like crazy.

Tesla & Ford are the only American carmakers not to have gone bankrupt out of 1000’s of car startups. Prototypes are easy, production is hard & being cash flow positive is excruciating.

Yeah, I did manage to throw the world champion sumo wrestler, but at the cost of smashing a disc in my neck that caused me insane back pain for 7 years!

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

When my brother and I were starting our first company... we rented a small office and we slept on the couch. We showered at the YMCA and we were so hard up that we had just one computer, so the website was up during the day and I was coding at night.

[on Neuralink] Short-term goal is addressing brain & spine problems. Ultimate goal is symbiosis of human & machine intelligence.

Illiteracy is the wellspring of poverty.

But if humanity wishes to become a multi-planet species, then we must figure out how to move millions of people to Mars.

People tend to get interested in and excited about precedents and superlatives.

I think that we should be concerned about A.I… we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive because I think by the time we are reactive in A.I. it’s too late.

Starlink will be a revolution in connectivity, especially for remote regions or for emergency services when landlines are damaged.

Making life multiplanetary is an extremely hard, but not impossible, problem.

We should be excited about the future & striving to go beyond the horizon!

[discussing fear of running out of fresh water] No, Earth has more water than we could possibly use and desalination only costs $3 for 1000 gallons!

Most people still think China has a one-child policy. China had its lowest birthrate ever last year, despite having a three-child policy! At current birth rates, China will lose ~40% of people every generation! Population collapse.

Goods & services are the real economy, any form of money is simply the accounting thereof.

Believe in the future!

The cemetery of automotive startups over the past century is very large & will get larger. Tesla & Ford are the only American car companies that haven’t gone bankrupt.

[on first Tesla factory] And there were actually zero employees in the factory after GM/Toyota left. They took all good equipment & sold most of rest for scrap. It looked apocalyptic inside.

I try not to pick fights, but I do finish them

Dogecoin is the people’s crypto.

U can’t sell cars u don’t own but u *can* sell stock u don’t own!? this is bs – shorting is a scam legal only for vestigial reasons

The Starship fleet is designed to achieve over 1000 times more payload to orbit than all other rockets on Earth combined Almost no one understands this.

[discussing early Tesla days] When Eberhard was fired unanimously by the board in July 2007 (for damn good reasons), no one left with him. That says it all.

To revolutionize space, the right metric is mass to orbit or you could translate that to # of useful satellites brought to orbit. No substitute for mass though. Scale don’t lie.

Competition ensures companies work hard to serve the needs of their customers.

The whole purpose behind tesla, the reason I put so much of my time and money in helping create the business is; we want to serve as a catalyst for accelerating the electric car revolution.

Starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass.

The dollar is shorting itself.

I love Dilbert! Use it all the time to illustrate that we’re doing something wrong at Tesla/SpaceX if it could be a Dilbert cartoon irl. This happens more often than I’d like (sigh).

There was a shuttle tragedy (Space Shuttle Challenger, 1986) and 7 people died and that’s terrible, but a lot of people die all of the time, but why do we care so much? Because it was the dream of exploration that was dying along with those people.

Both quality & quantity of high quality posts of all kinds (short text, long essays, pictures, audio & video) have improved dramatically. Thank you for contributing your voice to humanity’s digital public square! [on Twitter]

[regarding posting written content on Twitter] Our algorithm automatically gives higher preference for posts which have the most cumulative user-seconds, so native content will be recommended much more than links outside of Twitter.

There will not be a winter for AI, quite the opposite.

[tip for content creators] I recommend doing Twitter Spaces simultaneously and interacting with users dynamically while recording your podcast.

Community Notes will defend us from the deepfakes.

It is essential to provide the full truth, or as close as possible, to the public, independent of political leanings.

[upcoming Twitter feature] Mini viewer coming soon, so you can watch video while doing other things.

The Tesla AI/software team is truly exceptional & I never give false praise.

I hope this platform increasingly brings you joy & elucidation. [Twitter]

It should not be socially acceptable to call someone an [anything] supremacist, unless there is unequivocal evidence for such a claim.

There are some jobs that can be done effectively at home, but it is super out of touch to suggest that most people should do so, given that it is impossible.

Downtown SF & LA, for example, are *not* how we want civilization to end up. They are like a low energy version of Mad Max / Last of Us.

This platform is a great place to recruit! [Twitter]

Interest payments on national debt exceeding defense spending is a mind-blowing threshold to pass.

Regulatory oversight of AI is important to protect the public from companies potentially cutting corners on safety.

Frankly, I am pathologically optimistic – it’s a mental condition! Kinda have to be to try to do all these crazy things. And I always bite off more than I chew (sigh) & then sit there with puffed out cheeks like a squirrel that ate too much.

Love to see Starlink providing great connectivity to those who had little or nothing before. As soon as you can access the Internet, you can learn almost anything, so it’s absolutely essential for education. @khanacademy being a great example.

I strive to entertain humanity, whom I love.

Countries should be doubling down on nuclear! France is making smart moves in this regard.

The disaster that is downtown SF, once beatiful and thriving, now a derelict zombie apocalypse, is due to the woke mind virus.

It was love at first sight for me & computers tbh.

Maybe we’re in an alien soap opera and just need to keep the ratings high so we don’t get cancelled … ?

If AGI is almost here, why doesn’t autocorrekt work!?

Anyone who maims children should go to prison for life. This shouldn’t even need to be said.

It’s time we all took a stand against other people deciding what should offend us!

Starlink is a new version of the Internet in space.

America should be recruiting like a pro sports team, not making it insanely difficult for super talented people to become citizens.

There is great danger to media stoking the fires of hatred.

Highly recommend visiting [Rome]. Ancient Rome was remarkably advanced in technology & colorful in decor.

I think we should significantly increase legal immigration.If someone has a track record of working hard and hasn’t committed crimes, they should be welcomed.

Your support of content creators on this platform is very much appreciated. We keep none of the subscription revenue for the first 12 months & only 10% thereafter.

Prototypes are easy, production is hard and achieving positive cash flow is excruciating.

My earnest hope is that Americans of all political beliefs trust this platform.

Any organization that puts quotas above merit, instantly devalues their awards.

[on US border situation] It’s not a military invasion like Ukraine, but it’s also inaccurate to refer to everyone crossing the border as a refugee.

This platform is hell bent on being the least untrue source of information.

What’s actually happening in most countries is population collapse! Very important to make new humans. No new humans means no humanity.

In the end, all debts must be paid, just a question of when. Later makes it worse.

Major problem! Never demand that an AI lie. [on ChatGPT's woke leanings]

Turning sea water into clean, drinkable water costs $2 to $5 for 1000 gallons. Less than half a penny per gallon is obviously absurdly cheap.

SpaceX doesn’t even bother with patents, except to stop patent trolls.

There is a big difference between reaching space and reaching orbit.

If you get a sense that your customers want you to succeed, then you probably will.

Tomorrow will be the first sunrise of the rest of ur life – make it what u want and remember that happiness is a choice.

For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.

There is no way to be in touch with voters when you’re three generations away from voting age.

Normally, competitive pressure would force Apple to lower fees, but Apple & Android have a duopoly on phones. When interface familiarity is taken into account, it’s basically a monopoly. The effective 30% sales tax Apple charges is hidden from users or there would be an outcry.

Open primaries sound like a good way to move candidates to be more centrist. Term limits help with the gerontocracy problem, but, frankly, there should be a max age beyond which you can’t run (maybe 70?), just like there are min ages for house, senate & president.

My son asked if we would still speak English 7000 years from now. I said probably not. There was not even the faintest hint of English 7000 years ago.

Waymo is impressive, but a highly specialized solution. The Tesla approach is a general solution.

If you assume things are true by convention, which is actually what most people do, then it’s difficult to gain insight on how things can be bettered.

You wanna get up in the morning & be excited about the future. I'm trying my hardest to build a good future for the humanity. I love humanity & we should fight for a good future for humanity. We should be optimistic about the future.

Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere. I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock.

The truth is most people don't change their mind they just die.

Interviewer: “In your culture, would it be rude to do that? [discussing leaving pointless meetings] Elon Musk: “No, that’s expected. It’s rude to stay.

To be frank, in the early days, I thought there was >90% chance that both SpaceX & Tesla would be worth $0. The press & aerospace / automotive industry at the time (correctly) agreed with me.

If the alarming collapse in birth rate continues, civilization will indeed die with a whimper in adult diapers.

A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy.

By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.

In the last 12 years I have only tried to take a week off twice. The 1st time I took a week off, the orbital sciences rocket exploded & Richard Branson’s rocket exploded… the 2nd time I took a week off, my rocket exploded. The lesson here is don’t take a week off.

Generally, I’m a fan of minimal government interference in the economy. The government should be the referee… not the player.

Tesla is working as fast as possible to support Tesla owners worldwide. Sustainable energy affects everyone on Earth, as we all share one atmosphere.

Tesla has the potential to be the most valuable company ever.

Cancel culture needs to be canceled!!

[Twitter Tip] As a reminder, tap the stars icon on upper right of screen to switch between latest people you follow and recommended tweets.

I meet so many people who read twitter every day, but almost never tweet. If I may beg your indulgence, please add your voice to the public dialogue!

Twitter will start showing view count for all tweets, just as view count is shown for all videos. The system is far more alive than it would seem.

Compared to AI, progress with Neuralink will be slow and easy to assess, as there is large regulatory apparatus approving medical devices. There is no regulatory oversight of AI, which is a *major* problem. I’ve been calling for AI safety regulation for over a decade!

Jesus taught love, kindness and forgiveness. I used to think that turning the other cheek was weak & foolish, but I was the fool for not appreciating its profound wisdom.

Only two numbers are needed to calculate range: battery energy density and average vehicle energy consumed per unit distance.

I have Sam Gamgee’s words on my bedside table.

You know Twitter is being fair when extremists on far right and far left are simultaneously upset! Twitter aims to serve center 80% of people, who wish to learn, laugh & engage in reasoned debate. ❤️

The (currently) quiet majority should tweet more!

There are about 500M tweets per day & billions of impressions, so hate speech impressions are <0.1% of what’s seen on Twitter!

Transparency is the key to trust.

The safety of any AI system can be measured by its MtH (meantime to Hitler). Microsoft’s Tay chatbot of several years ago got there in ~24 hours.

The New York Times has become, for all intents and purposes, an unregistered lobbying firm for far left politicians.

ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.

The New York Times should rename itself The Social Justice Times.

Pretty wild that you can engage in back-and-forth dialogue with over 100k people live on Twitter Spaces!

The more Twitter improves its signal to noise ratio, the less relevant conventional news becomes.

Worth mentioning that Tesla has open-sourced its charge connector and is enabling other EVs to use Tesla Superchargers.

The delayed reaction of regular news is like nonstop déjà vu.

Testosterone rocks ngl.

The Constitution is greater than any President. End of story.

Starlink works in even the most remote regions of Antarctica.

[on AI] The ratio of total digital to total biological compute is the key metric to watch – it is rising incredibly fast.

[on ChatGPT] To be called AGI, it needs to invent amazing things or discover deeper physics – many humans have done so. I’m not seeing that potential yet.

Truth brings reconciliation.

When there are macroeconomic risks, it is generally wise to avoid using margin loans on any company, as stocks may move in ways that are decoupled from their long-term potential.

Easy to fool people, but it is almost impossible to convince people that they have been fooled.

Punctuality is not my strong suit, but I do deliver in the end.

Many battles remain, but... the tide is starting to turn on the mortal threat to civilization that is the woke mind virus.

The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters.

Tesla will be great long-term, but doesn’t control macroeconomic tides.

Starlink value proposition is “better Internet for less money” for most people in low population density areas.

At risk of stating obvious, beware of debt in turbulent macroeconomic conditions, especially when Fed keeps raising rates.

Tesla Team has done incredibly well, despite extremely difficult times. Could not be more proud of them.

Starlink will be great for text messages, voice calls & low res pics. If only a dozen phones are active, which is true in remote regions, then video will work.

[on Starlink] But the really mind-blowing thing is that this means your phone will work anywhere on Earth, unless blocked by local government!

I continue to oversee both Tesla & SpaceX, but the teams there are so good that often little is needed from me.

DMs should be encrypted, so that it is impossible for anyone at Twitter to see the public’s DMs, just as is the case with Signal or iMessage.

Most engineers don’t feel strongly about politics, but do want to work with other great engineers. Silicon Valley has world’s best engineering talent, but is co-located with San Francisco, which is far left. Thus, far left gained control of an incredibly powerful info weapon.

The far right and the far left will splinter off Twitter to irrelevant echo chambers.

Twitter won’t be perfect in the future, but it will be *much* better.

Much is made of meteor impacts that destroyed most life on Earth, but there were far more that “merely” destroyed a continent. Comets (not asteroids) are the real wild card, as we’re only able to track ~4600 out of ~1 trillion.

A union is just another corporation. Far better for many companies to compete for your skills, so that you have maximum optionality.

The robots are coming anyway, as Boston Dynamics videos clearly show. I will not be able to ensure that robots made by other companies are safe, but I can try my best to do so at Tesla.

Who wrote the software running in your head? Are you sure you actually want it there?

Unlike other makers of cars, our goal is *not* to profit from service. Best service is not needing service in the first place.

Working hard to make useful products & services for your fellow humans is deeply morally good.

To those who quietly help advance the causes we mutually believe in, knowing advancing the cause is the only reward: thank you.

Being a Mom is just as important as any career.

The amount of attention on me has gone supernova, which super sucks. Unfortunately, even trivial articles about me generate a lot of clicks :( Will try my best to be heads down focused on doing useful things for civilization.

Software is the key to the future.

Humanity will reach Mars in your lifetime.

[on how to innovate at your company] Establish an expectation of innovation and the compensation structure must reflect that… There must also be an allowance of failure.

I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.

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.

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.

I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

Everything works in PowerPoint; but if you have the physical item or some demonstration software, that’s much more convincing to people than a PowerPoint presentation or a business plan.

The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.

We polled Tesla owners, do you want autopilot disabled or not. Not one person wanted it disabled. That’s pretty telling.

A new space race has begun! [Jun 6, 2021]

Reusability is essential. A rocket that is single use is just as absurd as a single use airplane.

I’m a big believer in citizen journalism and following individual journalists over publications!

We’re trying as best as possible to do the right thing for the advancement of electrification; even if that diminishes our competitive advantage.

I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.

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.

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.

I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

Business or personal, wishful thinking causes a lot of trouble.

If we make life multiplanetary, there may come a day when some plants & animals die out on Earth, but are still alive on Mars.

I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.

There will definitely be a MarsCoin!

Open your eyes, look up to the skies.

Don’t just follow the trend... boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there. This is a good way to figure out if something really makes sense or if it’s just what everyone else is doing.

My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.

[discussing nature of running a business] “If you don’t do your chores, bad things will happen… it’s more fun to cook the meal than do the dishes, but you need to clean the dishes.

I think it’s important that you really like whatever you’re doing, if you don’t like it, life is too short.

Interviewer: ...that third failure in a row, did you think I need to pack this in? [rocket blew up] Elon: “Never. I don’t ever give up. I mean, I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.”

It’s remarkable how often The News attempts to answer the question: what is the worst thing that happened on Earth today?

It takes 20 years (time from conception to adult) to reverse demographic trends.

I’m staying at a friend’s place in Florida that is 85% powered by Tesla Solar Roof + Powerwall. When grid power goes down, air-conditioning automatically turns off in some of the house. Computers & lights don’t even flicker. Owner says he doesn’t notice.

People who don’t create products & services don’t realize that it takes hard work to produce products & services.

The Golden State is cooking its golden geese.

A new philosophy of the future is needed. I believe it should be curiosity about the Universe – expand humanity to become a multiplanet, then interstellar, species to see what’s out there.

Starting a business is not for everyone.

There’s something special about enjoying movies in a theater with total strangers. I hope that never goes away.

Words are a very lossy compression of thoughts.

If you’re going to try something innovative then you’re in unexplored territory, so the odds that something will go wrong are pretty high. It’s only if you try to do something that is well-understood that there’s little chance of failure.

We should look at currencies from an information theory standpoint. Whichever has least error & latency will win.

My true moral error was creating Tesla & SpaceX at same time, while avoiding general mgmt chores at Tesla (focusing only on product & engineering). Tried to have my cake & eat it too, which failed.

More people should study engineering and science, actually I’d say particularly engineering because engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the real world.

A well-thought-out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold and you should seek that from everyone you can, but particularly your friends. Usually, your friends know what’s wrong but they don’t want to tell you because they don’t want to hurt you.

A lot of people think I’m a fan of disruption, but I’m not really a fan of disruption. I am just a fan of things being better.

We gotta be excited about the future… life cannot always be about solving problems.

Music is a limbic resonator.

One of the most difficult choices I've ever faced was in 2008 & I had 30M$ left, I had 2 choices: I could put it all into one company & the other company would definitely die or split it between both companies, then both might die...

Gigafactory is the product even more than the car.

Essentially, passive Autopilot (car intervenes only when crash probability is high) cuts crashes in half. Active Autopilot (car is driving itself) cuts crashes in half again. Doesn’t mean there are no crashes, but, on balance, Autopilot is unequivocally safer.

Making large scale rocket propulsion landing work well is a critical step towards a fully reusable Mars transport system.

The rumor that I'm building a spaceship to get back to my home planet Mars is totally untrue.

It will be exciting to see what new cultures humanity creates on other heavenly bodies!

I never wanted to be CEO – just wanted to work on product/technology... Running companies hurts my heart, but I don’t see any other way to bring technology & design to fruition.

Human are absurdly concentrated on a tiny percentage of Earth’s surface. That’s why people in cities think Earth is “full” of people, when in fact it is basically empty.

The overarching problem is that we need better mental firewalls for the information constantly coming at us. Critical & first principles thinking should be a required course in middle school. Who wrote the software running in your head? Are you sure you actually want it there?

It is not as though I have the absence of fear, I feel it quite strongly. But there are times when something is important enough, you believe in it enough, that you do it in spite of the fear.

Generally, you want education to be as close to a video game as possible. You do not need to tell your kid to play video games on autopilot, all day.

It's starting to feel kinda normal to reuse rockets. Good. That's how it is for cars & airplanes and how it should be for rockets. [2017]

You wanna get up in the morning and be excited about the future. We should fight for the things that make us excited about the future. It cannot just be about solving one sad problem after another.

Moon brought us together in ‘69, Mars can do that in the future.

To be clear, I strongly believe in crypto, but it can’t drive a massive increase in fossil fuel use, especially coal.

Work like hell… 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 will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.

In general, I believe government should rarely impose its will upon the people, and, when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness. That said, I would prefer to stay out of politics.

The success of a company is very much more about how quick are you to fix the mistakes, not will you make mistakes.

I wouldn’t say I’m fearless. I feel fear quite strongly, but if what I’m doing is important enough, I just override the fear.

I always try to reserve time for my kids because I love hanging out with them. Kids are really great.

I don’t think we should disrupt things unless that disruption is going to result in something fundamentally better for society.

Besides ensuring the continuance of life, creating a base on Mars would be the most exciting adventure ever!

If I were to own Twitter, it would be geared towards the middle 80% of the population, so technically the far left and far right would probably be dissatisfied.

By mass, Earth is composed of ~32% Iron. Next most common element by mass is oxygen at ~30%, but only a small portion of that is in the atmosphere.

I swear my responsibility to the highest good for consciousness, while always re-examining what the highest good is.

Only the heart senses beauty.

Appreciate all the good wishes. First bday I’ve spent in the factory, but it’s somehow the best. [2018]

Tesla is best understood as a collection of about a dozen startups, mostly in series, increasingly in parallel. Every product line & new production system was invented. Instead of playing chess with the same pieces as everyone else, create new pieces.

Buy & hold companies that make goods & produce services you love.

I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

Contrary to what many think, the richer someone is, the fewer kids they have. I am a rare exception. Most people I know have zero or one kid.

Achieving truly decentralized finance – power to the people – is a noble & important goal. Layer count depends on projected bandwidth & compute, both rising rapidly, which means single layer network can carry all human transactions in future imo. For now, Lightning is needed.

Starship is in a different league. Orders of magnitude more mass to orbit than Falcon. Necessary for creating a self-sustaining city on Mars.

I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.

Take the red pill 🌹

Both the far left & far right have a lot of hate. One could simply replace the word “far” with “loathing”, as they have that emotion a lot, whereas most people, who are moderates, do not.

The sun is absurdly, overwhelmingly the source of energy in our solar system. Doesn’t even need maintenance – just works!

I am a big believer in the market system. The market system is just the collective will of the people.

The failures are mine, the successes belong to others.

Socialism vs capitalism is not even the right question. What really matters is avoiding monopolies that restrict people’s freedom.

Compared to past, today's world is fantastic & likely will be for many decades. Just need to cover future downside risk.

Taxing all billionaires at 100% only drops national debt by ~10%, which is just one year of deficit spending.

Am thinking of starting new university: Texas Institute of Technology & Science

Down the road, I'd love to work on something, which is a vertical takeoff and landing supersonic electric jet, and leverage what I've learned from SpaceX and from Tesla to try to make that happen.

Tesla is technically a car like an iPhone is technically a phone.

[discussing company culture at Tesla] Everyone eats same food, uses same restrooms, etc – no executive chef or other ivory tower stuff. There shouldn’t be this workers vs management two-class system. Everyone is a worker.

Gas at the pump doesn’t reflect the true cost of gasoline because you have consumption of public good. It’s a common problem in economics; you have the same thing in fishing where because there’s no cost to fishing stocks people just overfish and you have disaster that ensues.

Most big companies in tech have turned into places where talent goes to die. [2021]

When space travel becomes as common as air travel, the future of civilization will be assured.

Population collapse is a much bigger problem than people realize and that’s just for Earth. Mars has a great need for people, seeing as population is currently zero. Humans are the custodians of other life on Earth. Let us bring life to Mars!

I was just absolutely obsessed with Truth. The obsession with Truth is why I studied Physics, because physics attempts to understand the Truth of the universe. Physics is just what are the provable truths of the universe & truths that have predictive power.

I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house. [2020]

The fundamental issue with incentives or subsidies when it comes to renewable power is that we have been unwilling to establish a tax on carbon. If you can establish a tax on carbon, no incentives or subsidies would be necessary.

We should actively recruit the best & brightest to part of the United States! That is what every championship sports team does.

[discussing future of Twitter] Software engineering, server operations & design will rule the roost.

History is written by the victors … except on Wikipedia haha.

We should actively recruit the best & brightest to part of the United States! That is what every championship sports team does.

Politics is war and truth is the first casualty.

Trash me all day, but it’ll cost $8.

Perhaps more people might consider loving humanity. Our collective light of consciousness is a tiny candle in a vast darkness. Please do not let it go out.

Won’t be long before we view gasoline cars the same way we view steam engines today.

Education is the path out of poverty and Internet access enables education.

Tesla is to protect life on Earth, SpaceX to extend life beyond.

Instagram is an envy amplifier.

Anyone suspended for minor & dubious reasons will be freed from Twitter jail.

The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!.

Money is just data that allows us to avoid the inconvenience of barter.

I don't think we should try to have people live for a really long time. That'd cause asphyxiation of society because the truth is, most people don't change their mind. They just die. So if they don't die, we will be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn't advance.

Like I said, my preference is to hew close to the laws of countries in which Twitter operates. If the citizens want something banned, then pass a law to do so, otherwise it should be allowed.

If somebody doesn’t maintain their flying car, it could drop a hubcap and guillotine you.

During the darkest days of the Model 3 program, I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla (for 1/10 of our current value). He refused to take the meeting.

Most people have no idea Starship exists or how large this beast is! Body diameter (9m or 30 ft) is bigger than a 747 or A380. Starship thrust & mass are more than double Saturn V moon rocket. Making life multiplanetary means massive rockets. Got to be done.

To be frank, there is always some chance that Cybertruck will flop, because it is so unlike anything else. I don’t care. I love it so much even if others don’t. Other trucks look like copies of the same thing, but Cybertruck looks like it was made by aliens from the future.

If someone is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that’s a good thing, it doesn’t have to change the world.

The true battle is between fiat & crypto. On balance, I support the latter.

Starship is designed to carry people & cargo around Earth (also to moon & Mars). Vast majority of use will be civilian. It’s just like an airline in space. All airlines sometimes carry military cargo, but ~99% is civilian.

Exactly. Better to tax known bad thing and incent desired outcome, instead of subsidizing particular solution paths. Let market decide.

If you’re able to get great people to join the company, work together towards a common goal and you have a relentless sense of perfection about that goal, then you will end up with a great product.

I try to sort of figure out what's the right amount of sleep. I found I could drop below a certain threshold and although I would be awake more... I would get less done because mental acuity would be affected… the right number for me is around 6-6.5 hours.

US national debt is ~$28,900 billion or ~$229k per taxpayer. Even taxing all “billionaires” at 100% would only make a small dent in that number, so obviously the rest must come from the general public. This is basic math. Spending is the real problem.

Drive overrides fear, but I feel the fear.” [discussing his mindset]

Science-fiction should not be fiction forever!

I think the reality of being president is that you’re actually like a captain of a very huge ship that has a small rudder.

I think, certainly, we need to take a look at our immigration laws. If there are really talented people doing graduate courses and engineering at our universities, we really don't want to send them home.

Reasons to hate are remembered better than reasons to love. An evolutionary asymmetry helpful to survival, but counterproductive when survival is not at stake.

In Texas, it took us 18 months to build a Gigafactory. In California, we’d still be working on the permits.

People do not think critically enough. Critical thinking is a skill in short supply. People assume too many things to be true without sufficient basis in that belief.

Anxiety is a scalar, fear is a vector.

30 years ago, when 98% of scientists said smoking caused cancer, tobacco industry response was still ‘scientists disagree’.

World violence being super low is probably counter-intuitive to most people. That's because modern media is a misery microscope.

Assault rifles should at minimum require a special permit, where the recipient is extremely well vetted imo.

My interview questions are always the same; tell me the story of your life, and the decisions you made along the way and why you made them. And then also tell me about some of the most difficult problems you’ve worked on and how you solved them.

Civilization will be mostly solar-powered in the future.

Now that the big automotive advertisers are making EVs, you will see far fewer articles about EVs catching on fire. It is not surprising that internal combustion engine cars have a tendency to combust externally too.

Yeah, kids starting with lots of money usually have much less motivation than those who have nothing. When we started our first company (Zip2) in 95, I had over $100k of student debt, a computer I built myself and a few thousand dollars.

I am primarily trying to advance two causes: sustainable energy & extending life/consciousness beyond Earth. There is also the existential threat of AI, which we should aspire to mitigate.

Joe Rogan: “What’s a dream house for Elon Musk? Like some Tony Stark type sh*t?” Elon: “Yeah definitely… you gotta have the door that opens up with the stealth helicopter and that kind of thing, you know.”

[discussing what people should do if they don’t like the ceasing of remote work at Tesla] They should pretend to work somewhere else.

I do so wish that more companies would put down their spreadsheets for a moment and focus on making products that move your heart.

[discussing future Twitter developments] I think being able to dial the content you see from 'warm & fuzzy' all the way to 'bring it on mf!' is the way to go.

If you see the difference between a startup that is successful and one that is not, it’s because they both made mistakes but the successful one recognized the mistakes and fixed them very quickly, and the unsuccessful one tries to deny that the mistakes exist.

Creating the city of Starbase, Texas [March 2nd, 2021]

That funding round completed 6pm on Christmas Eve in 2008. Last hour of last day possible, as investors were leaving town that night & we were 3 days away from bankruptcy. I put in all money I had, didn’t own a house & had to borrow money from friends to pay rent. Difficult time.

Don’t be afraid of failure, but you also need to be rooted in reality… it’s easy to get high on your own supply. You’ve got to not be afraid to innovate but don’t delude yourself into thinking something is working when it’s not.

With our giant casting machines, we are literally trying to make full-size cars in the same way that toy cars are made.

Ratio of retirees to workers is tracking towards unsustainability in many countries. An upside down demographic pyramid is unstable.

The extreme difficulty of scaling production of new technology is not well understood. It’s 1000% to 10,000% harder than making a few prototypes. The machine that makes the machine is vastly harder than the machine itself.

There are already minimum age requirements for the House, Senate & Presidency. Reciprocally, there should be maximum age limits too.

As a general principle, for those looking for advice from this thread, it is generally better to own physical things like a home or stock in companies you think make good products, than dollars when inflation is high. I still own & won’t sell my Bitcoin, Ethereum or Doge fwiw.

We also have a rule that if somebody’s in a meeting and finds that this meeting is not helping them in a meaningful way and they’re not contributing to the meeting, they should just leave.

Engineering is magic made real.

[on rocket reusability] Nobody would suggest buying airplanes that only fly once & then crash into the ocean. That would be absurd …

If you scare people enough, they will demand removal of freedom. This is the path to tyranny.

Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.

Humans drive with eyes & biological neural nets, so makes sense that cameras & silicon neural nets are only way to achieve generalized solution to self-driving.

Physics is the law, everything else is a recommendation.

People ought to think more about who wrote the software that's running in their head (sigh). It probably wasn't them.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light of consciousness.

A beautiful thing about Twitter is how it empowers citizen journalism – people are able to disseminate news without an establishment bias.

Too much respect for authority inhibits innovation.

If somebody comes and makes a better electric car than Tesla, and it’s so much better than ours that we can’t sell our cars and we go bankrupt, I still think that’s a good thing for the world.

SpaceX has more active satellites in orbit than rest of Earth combined, tracking to double rest of Earth soon. [Oct. 20, 2022]

Think about who might have decided “The Current Thing” before accepting it.

Don’t just follow the trend… It’s good to think in terms of the physics approach or First Principles. Which is rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there.

[on recruiting] Just looking for problem-solvers who get things done with a high sense of urgency. Don’t care if or where they went to school.

Fuel cells should be called fool sells! Such a silly choice for cars. Not great even for a rocket upper stage imo, but at least not absurd.

People shouldn’t think, ‘Well, I feel fear about this and therefore I shouldn’t do it.’ It’s normal to feel fear, there would have to be something mentally wrong with you if you didn’t feel fear.

Don’t be afraid of new arenas, you know, you can get a book and you can learn something and experiment with your hands and just make it happen. Find a way or make a way to get something done.

Interviewer: “Someone told me before this interview that you work in a cubicle?” Elon: “I have a desk, yeah… it’s important to maximize communication... the more you insulate yourself from the organization… the worse decisions you make.

Just showing up is half the battle… you got to try hard to do it and don’t be afraid of failure.

It is unfortunately common for many in academia to overweight the value of ideas & underweight bringing them to fruition. For example, the idea of going to the moon is trivial, but going to the moon is hard.

Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.

I lived in the Fremont and Nevada factories for three years. I was running around like a manic trying to fix the production line. I slept on the floor so the teams didn’t think I lived in an ivory tower.

I would love to just do innovation and just do engineering, but you raise a good point because a lot of life in general in any job you have to do your chores. To be successful in anything you have to do the tough stuff as well as the enjoyable stuff.

[on Starship] It's designed to make life multiplanetary, otherwise extreme overkill for mere Earth sector activity! Starship fleet mass to orbit per year will be more than 1000 times all current Earth rockets combined, including Falcon. Necessary, for a city on Mars.

A careful observer would note that my (low basis) share sale rate significantly exceeds my 10b (high basis) option exercise rate, thus closer to tax maximization than minimization.

Important to bear in mind that production is as fast as the slowest part out of ~10,000 unique parts in a car.

Don't want to brag but … I'm the best at humility.

If heat death is the end of the universe, it really is all about the journey.

It's very difficult to start companies and quite painful… Think of it this way: if you need inspiring words, don't do it.

Physics should be taught with the majesty & beauty it deserves.

Self-driving car will amplify traffic to insane levels, as you won't feel the pain of driving yourself. [The Boring Company's goal is to solve this]

Actually, we still operate our California factory, which is the largest auto plant in North America, at full capacity and are considering expanding it significantly. It has built 2/3 of all electric vehicles in North America, twice as much as all other carmakers combined.

I do try my hardest to be good and sometimes I fear that untrue negative stories about me may cause others to excuse their bad behavior to their conscience, because they think I'm doing it too, but I'm not!

Uncharted territory will result in failures necessarily, otherwise you're not trying hard enough.

I am a strong believer in doing the reality of good over the perception of good. So we're just gonna take the heat. If we know we're gonna get sued despite doing the right thing, we will do the right thing and get sued.

[on wokeism] Humor relies on an intuitive & often awkward truth being recognized by the audience, but wokeism is a lie, which is why nobody laughs.

Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.

Over time, Tesla will generate hundreds of billions for the government in terms of employee income tax, product sales tax and property tax, in addition to profit taxation.

[Talking about building a house] Does it really make sense for me to spend time designing and building a house? I would be real OCD on the little details and the design… or should I be allocating that time to getting us to Mars? I should probably do the latter.

Tesla will argue for autonomous driving, but we're not going to argue against manual driving. I believe people should have the freedom to choose to do what they want to do.

We always try to do the right thing [at Tesla]. We really care about that. When we make mistakes, it's just because we were being foolish or stupid or whatever.

I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things, but almost all my time, like 80% of it is spent on engineering and design.

I will not let you down, no matter what it takes.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with profit. In fact, profit just means that people are paying you more for whatever you're doing than you're spending to create it. That's a good thing.

Focus on signal over noise. A lot of companies get confused, they spend money on things that don't actually make the product better. For example, at Tesla we've never spent any money on advertising, we put all the money into R&D, manufacturing and design...

[on Mars habitability] There's a lot of frozen CO2 & H2O on Mars. Heating the planet will densify the atmosphere. It's solvable.

[when asked about the Mars legal system] Let the Martians decide their own future.

Public support for life on Mars is critical to making it happen.

Never trust cynics, as they excuse their own bad deeds by telling themselves everyone does it.

Will visit IRS next time I'm in DC just to say hi, since I paid the most taxes ever in history for an individual last year. Maybe I can have a cookie or something …

I'm working on sustainable energy cars & solar that help Earth and making life multiplanetary, to ensure its continuance, with SpaceX.

I put in my last money, even though I thought we would still fail. But, it was either that or certain death for Tesla. Extremely difficult to raise money for an electric car startup (considered super quirky back then), while stalwarts like GM & Chrysler were going bankrupt.

Unless susceptible to extreme natural disasters, nuclear power plants should not be shut down.

Few seem to realize that China is leading the world in renewable energy generation and electric vehicles. Whatever you may think of China, this is simply a fact.

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.

We're trying as best as possible to do the right thing for the advancement of electrification; even if that diminishes our competitive advantage.

Make humanity a multiplanet species!

It is very important that people closely analyze what is supposed to be true and try analyze things from first principles, not by analogy or not by convention.

But reaching volume production with sustained positive cash flow was last achieved by an American car company, Chrysler, ~100 years ago! Ford & Tesla are the only American car companies to avoid bankruptcy. Even GM & Chrysler went bankrupt in 2009.

Out of curiosity, I acquired some ascii hash strings called “Bitcoin, Ethereum & Doge”. That's it. As I've said before, don't bet the farm on crypto! True value is building products & providing services to your fellow human beings, not money in any form.

Even if you're the best of the best there's always a chance of failure so I think it's important that you really like whatever you're doing. If you don't like it, life is too short.

[on early Tesla days] I went down to zero cash or sellable assets in 2008/2009, had no house & had to borrow money from friends to pay rent.

Profit just means that people are paying you more for whatever you're doing than you're spending to create it. That's a good thing. And if that's not the case you'll be out of business and rightfully so, because you're not adding enough value.

Tesla is responsible for 2/3 of all the personal & professional pain in my life combined. But it was worth it.

I only ever thought @SpaceX had enough money for 3 launches, my marriage fell apart and we were getting a divorce, Tesla financing round was falling apart and we were no where near production.. Great Recession.. Party ON.

I have so much respect for the associates doing an honest day's work at Tesla or SpaceX building & servicing cars, rockets, Starlinks, batteries, solar & many other things.

So strange that people often believe things inversely proportionate to the evidence. Given a set of possible explanations, why pick the extremely unlikely one!?

If we are able to make life self-sustaining on Mars, we will have passed one of the greatest filters. That then sets us up to become interstellar. Earth is ~4.5B years old, but life is still not multiplanetary and it is extremely uncertain how much time is left to become so.

It's 2017. I mean, we should have a lunar base by now. What the hell's going on? ... Becoming a multi-planet species beats the hell out of being a single-planet species.

The problem is that patents are generally used as a blocking technique, they're like using landmines in warfare. So, they don't help advance things they just stop others from following you. Most patents are BS.

[on scalability] “Our primary challenge is affordability. Creating an expensive truck is relatively easy. If it is extremely hard to do so for Tesla, despite our much greater economies of scale & better technology, then it is damn near impossible for others.

Politicians & political parties should be supported on their merits, not like they are one's favorite sports team.

Remember the future.

Some people don't like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.

A major part of real-world AI has to be solved to make unsupervised, generalized full self-driving work, as the entire road system is designed for biological neural nets with optical imagers.

[on consciousness] This is both great & terrifying. Everything we've ever sensed or thought has been electrical signals. The early universe was just a soup of quarks & leptons. How did a very small piece of the Universe start to think of itself as sentient?

I was at a lunch with Munger in 2009 where he told the whole table all the ways Tesla would fail. Made me quite sad, but I told him I agreed with all those reasons & that we would probably die, but it was worth trying anyway.

Tragically, it is not clear that the defense contractors can get to the moon for any amount of money. More than $200B has been spent on development of new US crewed space transport systems over past ~40 years, but only Dragon is flying. Development cost to NASA was <$2B.

Fate loves irony, but hates hypocrisy.

Goal of government should be to maximize the happiness of the people.

What is the purpose of the universities at this point? I think it's mostly just to hang out with peers, have some fun, and talk to your friends.

I think possessions kind of weigh you down.

Money, in my view, is essentially an information system for labor allocation, so it has no power in and of itself; it's like a database for guiding people as to what they should do.

Much of what people think of an science is actually engineering, eg no such thing as a “rocket scientist”, only rocket engineers. Latter is who put humans on the moon.

Production is hard. Production with positive cash flow is extremely hard.

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.

[on new verification idea] Someone has to have a phone and a credit card and $8 a month. That's the bar... it is a leveling of the playing field. It will be less special to have a checkmark but I think this is a good thing… I think it's going to be a good world.

I mean… don't we believe in one person one vote? I think we do… I actually just don't like the lords and peasants situation, where some people have blue checkmarks and some don't. You know... at least in the United States we fought a war to get rid of that stuff.

Truth is signal and falsehood is noise. We want to improve the signal to noise ratio as much as possible [on Twitter]

Starship will be crushingly cost-effective for Earth orbit or moon missions as soon as it's operational & rapid reuse is happening. Mars is a lot harder, because Earth & Mars only align every 26 months, so ship reuse is limited to ~dozen times over 25 to 30 year life of ship.

We can't be one of those lame one-planet civilizations!

If you're entering anything where there is an existing marketplace against large entrenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs. It can't be a little bit better.

It will be increasingly difficult to see Starlink satellites, as we're actively working with the astronomer community to ensure that even the most sensitive telescopes are fine & scientific progress is not impeded.

If you care about the reality of goodness instead of the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult.

Tesla team is awesome, such an honor to work with them!

The rocket business is definitely not a low-stress business, that's for sure.

There are definitely roles for patents. In the case of Tesla, our goal is to advance sustainable energy and we can't just do it by ourselves, we need the whole industry to go that way, so we gave them our patents for free in order to help them accelerate electric vehicles.

[on manufacturing] The first thing that you should do is make the requirements that you've been given less dumb. Whatever constraints and requirements were given, they were to some degree dumb and you want to make them less dumb.

[on his companies being a Dilbert cartoon] Any given company should have a question, ‘What's your Dilbert ratio?' It's not zero!

[on sleeping in the Tesla factory] It was damn uncomfortable on that floor, and when I woke up, I would smell like metal dust.

For a while there I was just sleeping under my desk, which is out in the open... for an important reason... since the team could see me sleeping on the floor during shift change, just with nothing, they knew I was there and that made a huge difference... they gave it their all!

[when people ask Musk how to encourage entrepreneurs] I say 'If you need encouragement, don't start a company haha.'

[on creating Starship] If this was a video game, the setting would be at extreme difficulty. Not impossible, but extreme difficulty!

But it is looking increasingly like for some of the critical elements of batteries that Tesla will need to get into the mining business; mining and refining.

The extreme antibody reaction from those who fear free speech says it all.

[after the Falcon 1 blew up for the 3rd time in 2008] For my part, I will never give up, and I mean never.

[on Falcon 1 success in 2008] But as the saying goes the fourth time's the charm, right? This really means a lot to SpaceX. Getting to orbit, that's just a huge milestone. There are only a few countries that have done it. It's normally a country thing, not a company thing.

AI optimizing for the greatest understanding of the universe might be the right objective. Eliminating or stunting human civilization would reduce understanding.

The internet has been the biggest equalizer in history in terms of access to information and knowledge.

We don't really patent things, I don't care about patents. At Tesla we open sourced all our patents, anyone can use them.

[on benefit of running Tesla and SpaceX] The automotive industry is very good at manufacturing and the rocket industry is good at advanced materials and making things light. So, that's where the cross pollination is most useful.

[when starting Zip2] I had like $2,000 and more than $100,000 in student debt and one computer. That summer in '95 I wrote the first maps and directions, white pages and yellow pages ever on the internet, personally, by myself.

I think wishful thinking is innate in the human brain. You want things to be the way you wish them to be, and so you tend to filter the information that you shouldn't filter.

I do think that twitter should authenticate all real users and prioritize those replies above unauthenticated users.

I never had a job where I made anything physical. I co-founded two internet software companies, Zip2 and PayPal. So it took me a few years to kind of learn rocket science, if you will.

I do agree with Peter [Thiel]'s point that a university education is often unnecessary… Because you can always buy the textbooks and just read them. No one is stopping you from doing that…

If the goal is to start a company, I would say there's no point in finishing college.

There are examples of successful entrepreneurs who never graduated high school, and there are those that have PhDs. I think the most important principle is to be dedicated to learning what you need to know, whether that is in school or empirically.

It shouldn't be that you got these grades where people move in lockstep and everyone goes through English, Math, Science, and so forth from 5th grade to 6th grade to 7th grade like it's an assembly line. People are not objects on an assembly line.

I care a lot about the truth of things and trying to understand the truth of things. I think that's important. If you're going to come up with some solution, then the truth is really, really important.

When you go through college... You have to answer the question that the professor gives you. You don't get to say, ‘This is the wrong question.

There is a value that colleges have, which is seeing whether somebody can work hard at something, including a bunch of annoying homework assignments.

Some people have this absurd view that the economy is some magic horn of plenty, like it just makes stuff... Let me just break it to the fools out there: If you don't make stuff, there's no stuff.

Fundamentally, if you don't have a compelling product at a compelling price, you don't have a great company.

[on recruiting] I really just ask them to tell me the story of their career and some of the tougher problems that they have dealt with, how they dealt with those, and how they made decisions at key transition points.

Some of the happiest seeming people are actually some of the saddest people in reality.

I want to accentuate the philosophy that I have with companies in the start-up phase, which is a sort of ‘Special Forces' approach. The minimum passing grade is excellent.

It's really hard to find someone who can grow a company. Running a company in a steady-state is much easier than growing a company.

I'm head engineer and chief designer as well as CEO [at SpaceX], so I don't have to cave to some money guy. I encounter CEOs who don't know the details of their technology and that's ridiculous to me.

I'd much rather promote someone who has strong engineering ability than so-called management ability. We do hire some MBAs, but it's usually in spite of the MBA, not because of it.

I certainly have lost many battles. So far, I have not lost a war, but I've certainly lost many battles... More than I can count, probably.

Rules and regulations are immortal. And if we keep making more every year, and do not do something about removing them, then eventually we'll be able to do nothing.

Government is simply the largest corporation... It is the ultimate corporation.

You can think of a corporation as like a cybernetic collective that's far smarter than an individual.

Large-scale manufacturing, especially of a new technology, is somewhere between 1,000% and 10,000% harder than the prototype. I would really regard, at this point, prototypes as a trivial joke.

The problem is that in the absence of new entrants into an industry, you don't have that force for innovation. It's really new entrants that drive innovation more than anything.

I don't think the government intends to stand in the way of innovation, but sometimes they can overregulate industries to the point where innovation becomes very difficult.

The most remarkable thing that we do have today is the internet and access to all the world's information from anywhere.

The tricky thing about predicting things when there is an exponential is that an exponential looks linear close-up. But actually, it's not linear.

I think, actually, all modes of transport will become fully electric, with the ironic exception of rockets. There's just no way around Newton's third law.

Down the road, I'd love to work on something which is a vertical takeoff and landing supersonic electric jet, and leverage what I've learned from SpaceX and from Tesla to try to make that happen.

Flying cars sound cool but then they do make a lot of wind, and they are quite noisy, and the probability of something falling on your head is much higher.

Ya know, it's pretty damn great to be able to talk to people from all walks of life and many countries on Twitter! So much to be learned, even from the harshest critics. Basically … I'm just saying I love all you crazy people ♥️♥️

I don't think everything needs to change the world, you know... Just say: ‘Is what I'm doing as useful as it could be?

Lie back and think of Mars.

There is so much potential with Twitter to be the most trusted & broadly inclusive forum in the world!

Twitter DMs should have end to end encryption like Signal, so no one can spy on or hack your messages

[on Hunter Biden laptop story] Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.

I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.

If our twitter bid succeeds [it succeeded!], we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!

Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy.

Let's make Twitter maximum fun!

A platform cannot be considered inclusive or fair if it is biased against half the country.

Dogecoin is the people's crypto.

Comedy is now legal on Twitter

The bird is free

The fundamental problem with cities is that we build cities in 3D. You got these tall buildings with lots of people on each floor but then you've got roads, which are 2D. That obviously just doesn't work. You're guaranteed to have gridlock.

If SpaceX and other companies can lower the cost of transport to orbit and perhaps beyond, then there is a lot of potential for entrepreneurship at the destination. You can think of it like the Union Pacific Railroad.

[on flying cars] Let's just say that if something's flying over your head, a whole bunch of flying cars going all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation.

[discussing SpaceX] We're just looking for any possible action that can improve the probability of success, no matter how small. Whether that comes from an intern or me or anyone, doesn't matter.

If the design is taking too long, the design is wrong.

Interns are great because they don't know what's impossible.

Digital super intelligence, I think, has the potential to be more dangerous than a nuclear bomb, so somebody should be keeping an eye [on it]. We can't have the inmates running the asylum.

I hope consciousness propagates into the future and gets more sophisticated and complex and that it understands the questions to ask about the universe.

Your phone is already an extension of you. You're already a cyborg.

I think that a future where we are a space faring civilization and out there among the stars, this is very exciting. This makes me look forward to the future.

[on starting Tesla] We think it actually is going to make a difference to the world if we transition to sustainable transport sooner rather than later. We're not doing this because we thought it was a way to get rich.

AI does not need to hate us to destroy us.

If you don't push for radical breakthroughs, you're not going to get radical outcomes.

I always try to reserve time for my kids because I love hanging out with them. Kids are really great. I mean, 99% of the time, they make you happier.

We've made so many mistakes in the beginning of Tesla that we basically had to recapitalize the company almost completely in 2007. Almost every decision we made was wrong.

We always try to do the right thing [at Tesla]. We really care about that. When we make mistakes, it's just because we were being foolish or stupid or whatever, but it's really always made with the right motivation.

If I ever do a tweet or a public announcement, it's got nothing to do with the stock price. What concerns me is I don't want customers thinking something that's wrong.

We cater our actions in our announcements to the long-term investors in Tesla. Those are the ones we really care about. The people that are in it just to speculate and then are out the next day—we feel about them about the same way they feel about us: we don't care.

The only two American car companies in history that have not gone bankrupt are Ford and Tesla.

We believe in doing deals where both parties benefit, and, when there is an asymmetry or under performance on our part, interpreting that in the other party's favor... Our goal in doing so is to build long-term trust.

Creating a new car company is extremely difficult and fraught with risk, but we will never be a company that by our action does, or by our inaction allows, the wrong thing to happen just to save money.

Things move as fast as the least lucky and least competitive supplier. Any natural disaster you care to name—all of those things have happened to our suppliers.

I felt like, obviously, my family will be in the car, my friends families—if I didn't do everything possible to maximize safety and something went wrong, I couldn't live with myself.

Tesla will argue for autonomous driving, but we're not going to argue against manual driving. I believe people should have the freedom to choose to do what they want to do. And, yes, sometimes those things are dangerous, but freedom is important.

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world's most talented engineers.

[on Tesla car service] The best way to experience service is of course not to experience service.

I have made it a principle within Tesla that we should never attempt to make servicing a profit center. It does not seem right to me that companies try to make a profit off customers when their product breaks.

The safest car you could drive is a Tesla.

Tesla is both a hardware and a software company, so a huge percentage of our engineers are actually software engineers, and you can think of our car as kind of like a laptop on wheels.

The thing I really focus on at Tesla is really putting all the money and attention into trying to make the product as compelling as possible, because I think that really the way to sell any product is through word of mouth... the key is to have a product that people will love.

The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.

[on recruiting] I really just look for evidence of exceptional ability, or at least aspiration. Sometimes these things get messed up in recruiting…

My premise is never to try to convince people why they should invest in Tesla. Sell your stock, I don't care.

Electric cars are the future. There's really no question about that at this point.

The only way a new car company breaks in is by making a car that is so compelling that people are willing to pay extra for that car.

Manufacturing is insanely difficult. It's under appreciated in its difficulty.

Manufacturing used to be highly valued in the United States, and these days it's not. It's often looked down upon, which I think is wrong.

Tesla should really be measured by how many years we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. It will happen with or without Tesla. But the fundamental good is by how many years do we accelerate it.

I think a Tesla is the most fun thing you could possibly buy ever. That's what it's meant to be... It's not exactly a car. It's actually a thing to maximize enjoyment.

I don't have any fundamental dislike of hydrocarbons. I simply look at the future and say, ‘what is the thing that will actually work?' And using a non-renewable resource obviously will not work.

If we don't have sustainable energy generation, there's no way that we can conserve our way to a good future. We have to fundamentally make sustainable energy available.

Something most people know, but don't realize they know, is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at 3 degrees Kelvin.

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.

We are really playing a crazy game here with the atmosphere and the oceans. We're taking vast amounts of carbon from deep underground, and putting this in the atmosphere. This is crazy. We should not do this.

I think a good rule of thumb is, don't compete with China with a commodity product. You're really asking for trouble in that scenario.

I think as long as we continue to be worried and concerned and work hard towards sustainability, then we will achieve sustainability.

[discussing SpaceX] In terms of our competitiveness, it mostly comes down to our pace of innovation. Our pace of innovation is much, much faster than the big aerospace companies or the country-driven systems.

If you look at innovation from large companies and from smaller companies, smaller companies are generally better at innovating than larger companies. It has to be that way from a Darwinian standpoint because smaller companies would just die if they didn't try innovating.

It's certainly a good compliment. If all your competitors are banding together to sort of attack you, that's a good compliment, I think. A very sincere compliment.

Falcon 1 is just our test vehicle... Our first foray. It's not the end game. It's the beginning of the beginning.

While most rockets are designed to burn up on re-entry, SpaceX is building rockets that not only withstand re-entry, but also land safely on Earth to be refilled and fly again.

[on SpaceX] If we don't succeed, then we will be certainly pointed to as a reason why people shouldn't even try for these things. So I think it's important that we do whatever is necessary to keep going.

[on rocketry reusability] I told my team, imagine there was a pallet of cash that was plummeting through the atmosphere and it was going to burn up and smash into tiny pieces. Would you try to save it? Probably yes.

[on landing a booster] I think this is quite significant. I can't say exactly where it would rank, but I do think it's a revolutionary moment. No one has ever brought an orbital class booster back intact.

Life is too short for long-term grudges.

I thought, nobody is going to be crazy enough to do space, so I better do space.

Right now on Earth, you can basically go anywhere in 24 hours. I mean anywhere… There is no real physical frontier on Earth anymore, but space is that frontier.

When you put your Blood, Sweat, and Tears into creating something, building something, it's like a child.

At this point, I think designing a rocket is trivial, just trivial. There's like, tons of books—you read ‘em and if you can understand equations, you can design a rocket. Real easy... Now making even one of those things and getting it to orbit is hard.

I definitely do not fire talented people, you know, unless there's no option... And absolutely not without warning.

[on starting SpaceX] Nobody who was good was willing to join, and there was no point in hiring somebody who wasn't good, so I ended up being chief engineer.

You want multiple companies competing to advance the future of spaceflight so we can ultimately become a multi-planet species and a spacefaring civilization.

If you had told somebody in '69 that we're not gonna be back on the moon in, like, 2020... You probably might even get punched, honestly... Because it's so intolerably rude to the future.

You can train yourself to pay attention to the tiny details; I think almost anyone can. This is very much a double-edged sword because then you can see all the little details, and then little details drive you crazy.

The internal name for designing the machine that makes the machine is the Alien Dreadnought. At the time at which the factory looks like an alien dreadnought, then you know you've won.

It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket. The problem with the Silicon Valley financing model is that you lose control after first investment round.

If you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about, take the lower valuation.

Some of the happiest-seeming people [are] actually some of the saddest people in reality.

The ability of Twitter advertising to reach the most influential people in the world is often not fully appreciated. While a few other social networks are technically bigger, Twitter is where the writers & leaders spend their time.

Twice as many people died in Japan last year as were born. Population freefall. Rest of the world is trending to follow.

Periodic reminder to try using Twitter Lists. Will greatly improve your experience.

High time humanity built a permanently occupied base on the moon.

[on Ukraine situation] The diplomats want war and the warriors want peace.

Earth is almost entirely solar-powered already. Without the sun, we'd just be a dark ice ball with some chemotrophic bacteria.

But, all things considered with regard to AGI existential angst, I would prefer to be alive now to witness AGI than be alive in the past and not.

For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they're racist against whites & Asians. Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America. Maybe they can try not being racist.

Now is the time to fight the anti-human woke mind virus with everything!

I have unblocked everyone I blocked, apart from scammers. I recommend others do the same. Negative feedback is a good thing.

A Russia-China alliance is inevitable. It will grow much stronger over time.

While there is relative good & bad, there are no pure angels in war. Beware those who say they are.

In a rapidly changing technology landscape, conventional wisdom fails.

Many go woke for the moral cloak.

Anyone against critical thinking cannot be regarded with any credibility at all.

[on ancient Rome's superiority] The main reason Rome won was because they had the best engineering

I keep getting déjà vu from the news thinking 'wait, that happened again!?', but actually it's just delayed reporting [because Twitter is the news now]

Say what you want about me, but I acquired the world's largest non-profit for $44B lol [Twitter joke]