Great companies are built on great products.
I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.
I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
No, I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.
Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.
I’ve actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don’t mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.
The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.
I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved.
If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.
There are some important differences between me and Tony Stark, like I have five kids, so I spend more time going to Disneyland than parties.
There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.
I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple’s product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.
When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.
We’re running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.
I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.
When I started SpaceX I thought that the most likely outcome was failure. And I think to have any other expectation would have been irrational.
People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.
I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I’ve got kids and responsibilities, so I can’t be my own test pilot. That wouldn’t be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it’s a sensible thing to do.
My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.