Elon Musk Quotes

I nearly failed when Virgin was in its infancy; I nearly failed in the early 1980s, and, of course, I have nearly died more than once trying to achieve a world record for boating or ballooning. But through a combination of luck and planning, both Virgin and I are still here.

The word entrepreneur is associated with success and adventure. From my life, the only thing I can tell you that's consistently associated with entrepreneurship is failure, and the only thing consistently associated with invention is frustration. There is a long road between the idea and the reality.

Hearing 'no' a lot of times usually tells you either you're crazy or you're on the right track, and you don't know which one it is until you finally launch.

Entrepreneurs need to start building today. The barrier to entry in tech is low, so start designing, start coding it, launch it, build prototypes, build a working version of it. The Internet has amazing powers of distribution. You can test your ideas. You can see if it works, if it doesn't work, whether it's fun, and whether you're sufficiently motivated. People who go into entrepreneurship to get rich aren't going to be happy. It’s the building of things that makes you happy. You have to enjoy the process whether you succeed or fail.

Most people ignore opportunities because they see only danger. Entrepreneurs ignore danger because they see only opportunities.

Starting a business is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. In mid air, the entrepreneur begins building a parachute and hopes it opens before hitting the ground.

The entrepreneurial mind-set is that risk is the heightened probability that there is a big range of possible outcomes.

True entrepreneurshi p comes only from risk-taking.

You can measure opportunity with the same yardstick that measures the risk involved. They go together.

It's not about failure; it's about trying something and risking something for attaining your goal.

Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act.

I can't say I'm not grateful to have journalists writing about me as a genius. But I know it's not true. I'm not confused. I understand that success comes through a lot of failure and a lot of very embarrassing failure. People want to create the next Facebook, but they are too afraid to create the next Facemash.

Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times.

Look at MIT—the smartest people in the world. They start up 50 companies a year. Only 1 makes it.

We started Fox when everyone said it couldn't be done.

Remember, I'm someone who got fired from Disney and eight days later started the first studio in 65 years with two of the most brilliant, successful people in the history of the entertainment business, doing something everyone said was somewhere between improbable and impossible. I'm afraid that's exactly what I love doing.

I do think there are more and more entrepreneurs all the time that think big. Those are the people we should be finding and funding. Most of them will fail, but the ones who succeed will change the world, and that is progress.

Different parts of the world have different attitudes to failure. Arguably, it may take more courage to be an entrepreneur in Sydney, or Paris, or London, or Japan, or Singapore... but an entrepreneur sees the world for what it could be, not what it is.

Trust me: Every entrepreneur has felt like an utter loser at some point.

When we failed and pivoted our business from mKhoj to InMobi or when we did not get any trained people with the required skillsets, as we were the first in the industry, and on many such instances in our journey, we would think of giving up every other day.

Entrepreneurship is usually about people executing in the face of other folks telling them that it's not going to work.

Almost anything worth doing involves some measure of risk - from learning to ride a bike, moving to a new city, and certainly, starting your own business. The point is that no one has ever started a business or created a new product with a guarantee of success.

I guess if there weren't luck involved, I'd win 'em all.

When I left my job at Lehman Brothers to start a company, my best friend's mother said, 'How could you leave a sure thing like Lehman to do a silly carpool startup?' That was three months before Lehman went bankrupt.

Everything I've achieved has come from perseverance. I've never met another entrepreneur who had a painless path to success - everyone who tries to bring new ideas to the world is tested.