Elon Musk Quotes

The world is a big place. There are lots of smart people in it. Entrepreneurs are kidding themselves if they think they have any kind of monopoly on knowledge. And, sure as I'm a Macintosh user, on the same day that an entrepreneur tells this lie, the venture capitalist will have met with another company that's doing the same thing.

The pace of innovation may slow down or speed up depending on the appetite in the public markets, but the constant progress of technology doesn't really ever stop. There's always opportunities for new ideas and creative people to go build great things. I'm always interested in learning about those kinds of opportunities.

I actually think the one who is underestimated in terms of impact he's had on society is Bill Gates. The reason is that with the innovation of software, he really allowed the computer revolution to take hold.

I see all this talk about jobs going overseas as a symptom of the absence of innovation. And the absence of innovation is a symptom of there being no major national priority to advance a frontier.

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

I want to be an inventor in the real sense.

New capabilities emerge just by virtue of having smart people with access to state-of-the-art technology.

No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.

There is no way to create wealth without ideas. Most new ideas are created by newcomers. So anyone who thinks the world is safe for incumbents is dead wrong.

If I want to do something powerful or special, then I contact people I think are smart, educated, inspiring and I'll say, "What are you doing? How can I help?"

We can all do better. America is an entrepreneurial society. We had entrepreneurs who started our country. And they want us to think in fresh, new, different ways all of the time.

Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.

Think for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor's thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing-press, whose thunder shakes the world.

Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.

Designers + artists see potential in things where others do not. I think artists in many ways are the original entrepreneurs.

Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.

As soon as I stopped trying to think about a business idea and started focusing on what I’m passionate about, that’s when it came to me.

The majority of America's colossal fortunes have been made by entering industries in their early stages and developing leadership in them.... Think of what opportunities the present and the future contain in such fields as ship-building and ship-owning, aircraft, electrical development, the oil industry, different branches of the automotive industry, foreign trade, international banking, invention, the chemical industry, moving pictures, color photography, and, one night add, labor leadership.

If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.

Japan will change. Let's create a country where innovation is constantly happening, giving birth to new industries to lead the world, when I visit Silicon Valley I want to think about how we can take Silicon Valley's ways and make them work in Japan.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless.

The creative process requires more than reason. Most original thinking isn't even verbal. It requires 'a groping experimentation with ideas, governed by intuitive hunches and inspired by the unconscious.' The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked.

So much of what we try to do is get to a point where the solution seems inevitable: you know, you think "of course it's that way, why would it be any other way?" It looks so obvious, but that sense of inevitability in the solution is really hard to achieve.

I don't go out and play football and stuff - that's not me. I want to think, I want to build, I want to talk, I want to create.

No man ever made a great discovery without the exercise of the imagination.