Businessman | Born: 28 June 1971, Pretoria, South Africa.
“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. There’s certain special skills, especially in advanced engineering, that are the limiting factor in creating new companies; we send these people home after training them in our graduate schools.”
“When I was a child, there's one thing I said: 'I never want to be alone.' That's what I would say.”
“Stop being patient and start asking yourself, how do I accomplish my 10-year plan in 6 months? You will probably fail but you will be a lot further ahead of the person who simply accepted it was going to take 10 years.”
“I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.”
“When something is is important enough, you do it anyway even if the odds are not in your favor.”
“The idea of lying on a beach as my main thing just sounds like the worst. It sounds horrible to me. I would go bonkers. I would have to be on serious drugs. I’d be super-duper bored. I like high intensity.”
“When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength--400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well, it's really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn't afraid of the dark anymore after that.”
“There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future?”
“It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”
“Constantly seek criticism. A well thought out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold.”
“If humanity is to become multi-planetary, the fundamental breakthrough that needs to occur in rocketry is a rapidly and completely reusable rocket … achieving it would be on a par with what the Wright brothers did. It’s the fundamental thing that’s necessary for humanity to become a space-faring civilization. America would never have been colonized if ships weren’t reusable.”
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour.”
“At SpaceX, we specialize in converting things from impossible to late.”
“Don’t want to brag but … I’m the best at humility”
“I mean, I think that if people are concerned about volatility, they should definitely not buy our stock. I’m not here [on an earnings call] to convince you to buy [Tesla] stock. Do not buy it if volatility is scary. There you go.”
“I really like computer games, but then if I made really great computer games, how much effect would that have on the world.”
“If you punish people too much for failure, then they will respond accordingly and the innovation you will get will be very incrementalist. Nobody's going to try anything bold for fear of getting fired or punished in some way. The risk/reward must be balanced, in favor of making bold moves.”
“In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a [?], like a collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing.”
“Life needs to be more than just solving problems every day. You need to wake up and be excited about the future.”
“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.”
“Don't confuse schooling with education. I didn't go to Harvard but the people that work for me did.”
“Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication […] No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.”
“I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing tht makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”
“I think it would be great to be born on Earth and die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact.”
“I wonder how many dead one-planet civilizations are out there in the cosmos that never made it to the other planet and ultimately extinguished themselves or were destroyed by external factors. Probably a few.”
“If something is important enough, you should try even if the probable outcome is failure.”
“If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules.”
“My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.”
“The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment.”
“You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”
“I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and create a new company.”
“I think I have a pretty deep understanding of what Money actually is on a practical day to day basis because of paypal. right now, the money system for practical purposes is really a bunch of heterogeneous mainframes running old COBOL. Literally.”
“One of the biggest mistakes we made was trying to automate things that are super easy for a person to do, but super hard for a robot to do.”
“They were building a Ferrari for every launch, when it was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick.”
“Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.”
“I take the position that I'm always to some degree wrong, and the aspiration is to be less wrong.”
“I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better.”
“I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents”
“Money is an information system for labor allocation”
“My children didn't choose to be born, I chose to have children. They owe me nothing, I owe them everything”
“One of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask. Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy.”
“The first step is to establish that something is possible then probability will occur.”
“To anyone I’ve offended I just wanna say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship…Did you also think I was gonna be a chill normal dude?”
“America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.”
“Constantly think about how you could be doing things better.”
“Education is basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain.”
“Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors. ”
“I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future”
“I want to die on Mars, just not on impact.”
“I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.”
“I'm a Nazi! With all my heart!”
“If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea.”
“It's okay to have all your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to the basket.”
“No, I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated”
“Science is discovering the essential truths about what exists in the Universe, engineering is about creating things that never existed”
“With automation comes abundance.”
“Working hard to make useful products & services for your fellow humans is deeply morally good.”
“You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on... So it's a fixer-upper of a planet.”
“Any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life”
“I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”
“I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”
“If you do not like it then life is too short”
“If you give yourself 30 days to clean to clean your home, it will take you 30 days. But if you give yourself 3 hours, it will take your 3 hours . The same applies to your goals, ambitions and potential.”
“It is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”
“Many people will panic to find a charger before their phone dies. But won't panic to find a plan before their dreams dies.”
“The Apocalypse can come along any moment!”
“They should have made the pork crisps bomb flavour (shit joke)”
“You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve”
“If you buy a ticket to hell, it isn't fair to blame hell.”
“If you need inspiration, don't do it.”
“The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.”
“The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation”
“I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad.”