Elon Musk Quotes

We use technology to make it cheaper, better, and faster for the client. And then if you have the most flow, you can win. Now, having said that, Silicon Valley wants to take on this business. They think they see an opening.

The most successful company in Silicon Valley is Apple, and they're the most secretive.

When I came into the mobile phone business, I was really the upstart who pretty much took the business, not quite by storm, but really made an impact on it quite early on. But it was from a position, really, of feeling that I was a last mover.

If you bet on Microsoft, you are not going to ask anymore, 'Hey, where is the innovation?' The challenge going forward is how do we keep up with it.

All things can be done by every company in the world. Apple builds a phone, and so does Samsung. It's not about being different but about being better at what you do.

What can we learn from the battle between data and design? What can we learn from the relationship between Google and Apple? Clearly no one school of thought is right: Apple and Google are both wildly successful and profitable companies that changed the world.

The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected.

I'd rather Apple cannibalize Apple than somebody else cannibalize Apple.

It's very difficult in the technology space when you have been leapfrogged to prosper again.

Except in very narrow cases, where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you're toast anyway.

The Internet moves very fast. In the old world, we could afford to sit and analyze forever. But in the new world, the first mover has the advantage.

In America, when you bring an idea to market, you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share. In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China - execution is.

Google worries - and rightly so - about how hard it is for a big company to come up with the next hot thing.

Customers are willing to try new things, and if you can survive, you will have fewer competitors. It's like entering the eye of the storm. As long as you are strong enough to survive, you can end up in still water by yourself.

The problem with Myspace was always that it was never as strong a product as it needed to be. It left itself vulnerable to competition. It was only a matter of time before someone created something better.

The world moves fast. Business moves fast. Digital media moves extremely fast. It is far too easy to allow ourselves to be constantly blown from one trend to the next.

Patents have not been a positive force in stimulating innovation at Cisco. Competition has been the motivator; bringing new products to market in a timely manner is critical. Everything we have done to create new products would have been done even if we could not obtain patents

He who puts ... a product upon the market as it demands, controls that market, regardless of color. It is simply a survival of the fittest.

The patent system was established to encourage inventors to disclose the details of their inventions. Its purpose was to help society rather than to help inventors. At the time, the life span of 17 years for a patent was short compared with the rate of advance of the state of the art. Since patents are an issue only among manufacturers, for whom the cost and effort of a license agreement are small compared with setting up production, the patents often do not do much harm. They do not obstruct most individuals who use patented products.

You've got to remember there's intense competition between Microsoft and Amazon.

The second you get set in your ways is the second a newer, fresher, more innovative company is going to come in and take your market share.

To thrive, all businesses must focus on the art of self-disruption. Rather than wait for the competition to steal your business, every founder and employee needs to be willing to cannibalize their existing revenue streams in order to create new ones. All disruption starts with introspection.

Competition matters.

In this business, technology is life or death.

If Dell's going to be a fast follower, then we'll continue to innovate.