Elon Musk Quotes - 98 quotes

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk is an entrepreneur, industrial designer, and engineer. He is the founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX. He is an early investor, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc. He is the owner and CEO of Twitter (now X). He is co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. He is a founder of The B... show more

quote icon 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?"

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quote icon And it's damn annoying when someone you don't like says something you don't like. That is a sign of a healthy functioning free speech situation.

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quote icon I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic and anything that results in the suppression of free speech.

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quote icon Its bizarre that we've come to this point where, like free speech used to be a left or liberal value. And yet we see from, in the quotes left, a desire to actually censure.

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quote icon I really can't emphasize this enough. We must protect free speech, and free speech only matters, its only relevant when its someone you don't like saying something you don't like, because obviously free speech that you like, its easy.

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quote icon Elon: We're not in any danger of resource collapse. Maher: But lot's of people don't have enough food or water. Water, we will run out of water. They're running out of sand. Elon: Earth is 70% water by surface area. Maher: But you cant drink that. Elon: Desalination is absurdly cheap. Maher: Why don't we do it then? Elon: We do it. Maher: You have a lot of free time. Elon: There's a lot of desalination done. There's plenty of water. It's not an issue. I want to be clear.

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quote icon Joe Rogan: Now you're in the middle of this uh, this strange time where you're selling your houses, you say you don't want any material possessions. I've been seeing all that and I've been really excited to talk to you about this. Because it's an interesting thing coming from a guy like yourself. Like why are you doing that? Elon Musk: I'm slightly sad about it actually. Joe Rogan: If you're sad about it why you doing it? Elon Musk: I think possessions kind of weigh you down. Then they're kind of an attack vector. You know. People say hey billionaire you've got all this stuff. Like well, now I don't have this stuff, what you gonna do? Joe Rogan: Attack vector meaning like people target it? Elon Musk: Yeah

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quote icon I think possessions kind of weigh you down. Then they're kind of an attack vector. You know. People say hey billionaire you've got all this stuff. Like well, now I don't have this stuff, what you gonna do?

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quote icon This notion though, that you can just sort of send checks out to everybody and things will be fine is not true, obviously. Some have this absurd view that the economy is like some magic horn of plenty… that just makes stuff. There’s a magic horn of plenty, and the goods and services, they just come from this magic horn of plenty. And then if somebody has more stuff than somebody else, it’s because they took more from this magic horn of plenty. Now let me just break it to the fools out there: If you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff. If you don’t make the food, if you don’t process the food, if you don’t transport the food, medical treatment, getting your teeth fixed, there’s no stuff. We’ve become detached from reality. You can’t just legislate money and solve these things. If you don’t make stuff, there is no stuff.

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quote icon According to the geological records, earth has been around for around 4.5 billion years, although it was mostly molten magma for about half a billion years... The sun is gradually getting hotter and bigger, and over time, even in the absence of global warming — the man-made stuff — the sun will expand and it will overheat the earth. My guess is probably... there is only several hundred million years left.... Basically, if it took an extra 10% longer for conscious life to evolve on earth, it wouldn't evolve at all, because it would have been incinerated by the sun. ... It appears that consciousness is a very rare and precious thing, and we should take whatever steps we can to preserve the light of consciousness, and the window has been open; only now after four and a half billion years is that window open, that's a long time to wait ... I'm pretty optimistic by nature, but there's some chance that window will not be open for long, I think we should become a multi-planet civilization while that window is open, and if we do the I think probable outcome for Earth is even better, because then you know Mars could help Earth one day.

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quote icon I have this mantra. It's called, "If a schedule is long, it's wrong. If it's tight, it's right." And I've just, basically just go recursive improvement on schedule, with feedback loop. "Did this make it go faster? OK. If it didn't, we're going to need to fix it." If the design takes a long time to build, it's the wrong design. This is the fundamental thing. Over and over, the tendency is to complicate things. And I have another thing which is, the best part is no part. The best process is no process. It weighs nothing, costs nothing, can't go wrong. So, as obvious as that sounds, the best part is no part. The thing I'm most impressed with, when I have the design meetings at SpaceX, is "What did you undesign?" Undesigning is the best thing. Just delete it. That's the best thing.

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quote icon So step one, make your requirements less dumb. Step two, delete the part or process step. If you're not deleting a part or process step at least 10% of the time, basically if you're not adding things back in 10% of the time, you're clearly not deleting enough. And then only the third step is simplify or optimize. The third step. Not the first step. The reason it's the third step is because it's very common, possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist.

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quote icon Possibly, the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.

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quote icon Well, everyone has been trained in high school and college, that you've gotta answer the question. Convergent logic. So you can't tell a professor, your question is dumb. You will get a bad grade. You have to answer the question. So everyone is basically without knowing it, they've got like mental straight jacket on. That is, they'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist.

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quote icon Finally, you get to step four, which is accelerate cycle time. You're moving too slowly, go faster. But don't go faster until you've worked on the other three things first. If you're digging and you're grave, don't dig it faster. Stop digging your grave.

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quote icon And then the final step is automate.

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quote icon There's another important principle, which is that you really want everyone to be chief engineer. So if everyone is chief engineer means that people need to understand the system at a high level to know when they are making a bad optimization.

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quote icon I think currently manufacturing is underrated and design is overrated. So people generally think that, like this Eureka moment, like you come up with this idea and that's it, now it it's good. But the design like this, literally a thousand percent, maybe ten thousand percent more work that goes into the production system than the thing itself.

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quote icon If people have not been in manufacturing, especially manufacturing of something that's relatively new, then they don't understand. And they think the design is the hard part, and they think production is like a copier or something like that.

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quote icon Humanity will become a multi-planet species, if we get cost per ton to orbit to the point where we can afford to become a space race civilization and a multiplanet species.

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quote icon All designs are wrong, it's just a matter of how wrong.

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quote icon First make your requirements less dumb. Your requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you. It's particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements, because you might not question them enough. ... Everyone's wrong, no matter who you are, everyone's wrong some of the time. So make requirements less dumb, then try very hard to delete the part or process. This is actually very important. If you're not occasionally adding things back in, you are not deleting enough. The bias tends to be very strongly towards, let's add this part of the process step in case we need it. But you can basically make in case arguments for so many things.

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quote icon Whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department. Because you can't ask the departments, you have to ask a person. And that person who's putting forward the requirement or constraint must agree that they must take responsibility for that requirement.

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quote icon I'm not really super hard core about being ultra environmental in all things. Because I think that you don't want to make life miserable. We want to create a better future, but a better future is not one where we are constantly depriving ourselves of things that we love.

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quote icon We need to figure out how to have the things we love, and not destroy the world. That's the trick of it.

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quote icon You can’t show up at Mars in something the size of a rowboat. What if there are Martians? It would be so embarrassing.

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quote icon People tend to think like, 'Why should electric vehicles have a subsidy,' but they're not taking into account that all fossil fuel-burning vehicles fundamentally are subsidized by the cost—the environmental cost—to Earth, but nobody's paying for it... We are going to pay for it, obviously—in the future we'll pay for it. It's just not paid for now.

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quote icon Like it took us a long time to even frame the question correctly. But once we could frame the question correctly, the answer was, I wouldn't say easy, but, the answer flowed once the question could be framed with precision. Framing that question with precision was very difficult.

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quote icon We're not paying attention. We worry more about what name somebody called someone else, than whether AI will destroy humanity. That's insane. We're like children in a playground. ... The way in which a regulation is put in place is slow and linear. If you have a linear response to an exponential threat, it's quite likely the exponential threat will win. That, in a nutshell, is the issue.

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quote icon It’s so insane the way rockets work today. It would be like if you got a plane and the way you get to your destination is you bail out with a parachute over the city in question and your plane crash lands somewhere. That’s how rockets work today—with the exception of Falcon 9. This is completely bonkers.

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quote icon If somebody wants to stay in their house, that’s great. They should be allowed to stay in their house, and they should not be compelled to leave. But to say that they cannot leave their house, and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom.

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quote icon Bernie is a taker, not a maker

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quote icon I find history fascinating. There's a lot of incredible things that have been done, good and bad, that they help you understand the nature of civilization and individuals.

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

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quote icon I don't think we should try to have people live for a really long time. That it would 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.

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quote icon This is just my strong, intuitive sense ... that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization

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quote icon Do you still have a half billion dollar short position against Tesla? Sorry, but I cannot take your philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change.

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quote icon We are going to try to send something to Mars on every Mars rendezvous from this point on.

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quote icon You are assuming that I wish to be popular. I don't care. I do care that millions of people may die needlessly for an essentially identical outcome. Russia is doing partial mobilization. They go to full war mobilization if Crimea is at risk. Death on both sides will be devastating. Russia has >3 times population of Ukraine, so victory for Ukraine is unlikely in total war. If you care about the people of Ukraine, seek peace.

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quote icon Something will happen to Earth eventually, it’s just a question of time. Eventually the sun will expand and destroy all life on Earth, so we do need to move at some point, or at least be a multi-planet species. [...] You have to ask the question: do we want to be a space-flying civilisation and a multi-planet species or not? [...] It's a question of what percentage of resources should we devote to such an endeavour? I think if you say 1 per cent of resources, that's probably a reasonable amount.

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quote icon I play the fool on Twitter and often shoot myself in the foot and cause myself all sorts of trouble . . . I don't know, I find it vaguely therapeutic to express myself on Twitter. It's a way to get messages out to the public.

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quote icon I'm subject to literally a million laws and regulations and I obey almost 99.99 per cent of them. It's only when I think the law is contrary to the interest of the people that I have an issue.

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quote icon To independent-minded voters: Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic.

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quote icon Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.

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quote icon The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right-wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society... That is why I bought Twitter. I didn't do it because it would be easy. I didn't do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love ... That said, Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences!

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quote icon Is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn’t turn out to be true? So far they’ve all turned out to be true — if not more true than people thought.

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quote icon Better to talk to people than communicate via tweet.

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quote icon Best way to fight misinformation is to respond with accurate information, not censorship

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quote icon Any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life

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quote icon A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far. Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis.

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quote icon I'm sort of worried that hey, civilization, if we don't make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization's going to crumble.

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quote icon I'll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.

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quote icon History is written by the victors. Well, yes, but not if your enemies are still alive and have a lot of time on their hands to edit Wikipedia.

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quote icon I think that email was perhaps interpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a pulse check review. Do you have a pulse?" Musk said. "And if you have a pulse and two neurons, you could reply to an email."

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quote icon Tesla CEO Elon Musk thinks you should work on your “soft skills,” especially if you want to keep your job in the face of increasingly sophisticated automation. “A.I. will make jobs kind of pointless,” Musk told the audience at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai...

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quote icon Instead of knowledge, schools pour poison into the ears of our children

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quote icon We will have something that is, for the first time smarter than the smartest human. It's hard to say exactly what that moment is, but there will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you wanted to have a job for personal satisfaction. But the AI would be able to do everything. I don't know if that makes people comfortable or uncomfortable. If you wish for a magic genie, that gives you any wish you want, and there's no limit. You don't have those three wish limits nonsense, it's both good and bad. One of the challenges in the future will be how do we find meaning in life.

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quote icon SpaceX has roughly 6000 satellites and not once have we had to maneuver around a UFO.

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quote icon Civilization is rare. We should do everything possible to save it.

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quote icon I would urge parents to limit the amount of social media that children can see because they're being programmed by a dopamine-maximizing AI.

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quote icon Indeed, great damage was done today to the public’s faith in the American legal system. If a former President can be criminally convicted over such a trivial matter – motivated by politics, rather than justice – then anyone is at risk of a similar fate.

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quote icon The CEO of an aircraft company should know how to design aircraft, not spreadsheets.

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quote icon Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life

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quote icon If things aren't not failing you are not innovating enough.

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quote icon The heroes of the books I read, The Lord of the Rings and the Foundation series, always felt a duty to save the world.

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quote icon I believe there’s some explanation for this universe, which you might call God.

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quote icon No one should put this many hours into work. This is not good. People should not work this hard. They should not do this. This is very painful. ...it hurts my brain and my heart. ... This is not recommended for anyone. ... I just did it because if I didn't do it, then there was a good chance Tesla would die.

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quote icon Frankly, I can't believe I'm here doing this. It's kind of bizarre. But I kind of think that we've got this enormous federal budget deficit, and it's a $2 trillion deficit. It keeps growing. Our interest payments are higher than our Defense Department budget. [That], I think, was the real wake-up call for me. "If we didn't do something about this, then there won't be any money for anything. We'll just be servicing debt," he continued. "Really, I just don't want America to go bankrupt.

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quote icon I have been disappointed to discover how many contractor companies are interwoven throughout Tesla. Often, it is like a Russian nesting doll of contractor, subcontractor, sub-subcontractor, etc. before you finally find someone doing actual work. This means a lot of middle-managers adding cost but not doing anything obviously useful. Also, many contracts are essentially open time & materials, not fixed price and duration, which creates an incentive to turn molehills into mountains, as they never want to end the money train.

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quote icon Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command”. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.

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quote icon Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.

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quote icon What many people do not appreciate is that technology does not automatically improve; it only improves if a lot of really strong engineering talent is applied to the problem.

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quote icon “Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.”

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quote icon Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.

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quote icon Anyone who says that questioning them is questioning science itself cannot be regarded as a scientist.

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quote icon One [path] is that we stay on Earth forever and then there will be an inevitable extinction event. The alternative is to become a space faring civilization, and a multi-planetary species.

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quote icon I don’t have an issue with serving in the military per se, but serving in the South African army suppressing black people just didn’t seem like a really good way to spend time.

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

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

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

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quote icon When thinking about starting a business, I think it’s actually better to start in a trough and come to market in a peak, than the other way around.

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quote icon I like to be involved in things that change the world. The Internet did, and space will probably be more responsible for changing the world than anything else. If humanity can expand beyond the Earth, obviously that's where the future is.

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quote icon If we can build something that is capable of taking people and equipment to Mars, such that it can service a transportation infrastructure for humanity becoming a multi- planet species - which I think is a very, very important objective - then I would consider the mission of SpaceX successful, at that point.

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quote icon We are used to things improving every year; we are used to having a better cell phone next year than this year; a better lap top. We are even used to some basic things, like we expect more from your car in next year’s model than last year’s model. But this is not the case in space; reliability and cost - those are the fundamental parameters of transportation - have not improved.

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quote icon Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell.

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quote icon I think it is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive

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quote icon If you have millions of dollars it changes your lifestyle, and anyone who says differently is talking bullshit. I don’t need to work, from a standard of living point of view, but I do, you know. I work every day and on weekends and I haven’t taken a vacation for years.

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

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quote icon One thing that is important is that, if you have a choice between a lower valuation with someone you really like, or higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about, take the lower valuation.

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quote icon I would like to die on Mars; just not on impact.

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quote icon Only by breaking through to new paradigms of space travel will more than a handful of us ever get to Mars and make it a potentially livable place.

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon AI is much more advanced than people realize. ... Humanity's position on this planet depends on its intelligence so if our intelligence is exceeded, it's unlikely that we will remain in charge of the planet.

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quote icon I can be on my own private island with naked super models, drinking mai tais, but I'm not. I'm in the factory working my ass off, so I don't want to hear about how hard everyone else in the factory works.

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quote icon People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it will, I think, by itself degrade, actually. You look at great civilizations like Ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that.

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quote icon I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.

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quote icon Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.

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quote icon I love Twitter. How much is it?

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