Overview (3) Mini Bio (1) Family (4) Trivia (19)

CEO & Product Architect of Tesla Motors and CEO & CTO SpaceX.

Co-founder, PayPal.

Chairman, Solar City.

Inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 2014.

Inducted into the Entrepreneur Hall of Fame.

8 books that he credits to his success are: 1.Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down" by J.E. Gordon, 2. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" by Walter Isaacson, 3. Einstein: His Life and Universe" by Walter Isaacson, 4. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" by Nick Bostrom, 5. Merchants of Doubt" by Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes, 6. Lord of the Flies" by William Golding, 7. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future" by Peter Thiel, 8. Foundation" trilogy by Isaac Asimov.

Read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica at age nine.

Read science fiction novels for more than 10 hours a day.

His SpaceX company made history, successfully completing the first commercial rocket launch from the NASA launch pad.[February 2017].

When asked if he believed religion and science could co-exist, Musk replied "Probably Not".

He does not pray or worship before rocket ship launch.

On April 2022, he bought the social platform Twitter, for the amount of 44 billion dollars.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.

I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I'm really good at email.

Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.

I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

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.

The path to the CEO's office should not be through the CFO's office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.

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

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 think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

If you go back back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic - being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

I've actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don't mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.

I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.

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.

When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that externality remains unpriced.

Yeah, well I think anyone who likes fast cars will love the Tesla. And it has fantastic handling by the way. I mean this car will crush a Porsche on the track, just crush it. So if you like fast cars, you'll love this car. And then oh, by the way, it happens to be electric and it's twice the efficiency of a Prius.

I don't spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.

Patience is a virtue, and I'm learning patience. It's a tough lesson.

It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.

Life is too short for long-term grudges.

The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment - my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

I've actually not read any books on time management.

We're running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere... can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.

I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple's product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

There are some important differences between me and Tony Stark, like I have five kids, so I spend more time going to Disneyland than parties.

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems... It's got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure - the law firms, the real estate, all that - that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.

It's obviously tricky to convert cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.

An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars - this is very important - so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there.

I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It's a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that's what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.

It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.

If humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.

I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I've got kids and responsibilities, so I can't be my own test pilot. That wouldn't be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it's a sensible thing to do.

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.

America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.

The rumours of the demise of the U.S. manufacturing industry are greatly exaggerated.

It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don't think it's possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.

I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved.

Automotive franchise laws were put in place decades ago to prevent a manufacturer from unfairly opening stores in direct competition with an existing franchise dealer that had already invested time, money and effort to open and promote their business.

I'm anti-tax, but I'm pro-carbon tax.

The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.

There's nothing - I've bought everything I want. I don't like yachts or anything; you know, I'm not a yacht person, and I've got pretty much the nicest plane I'd want to have.

For all the supporters of Tesla over the years, and it's been several years now and there have been some very tough times, I'd just like to say thank you very much. I deeply appreciate the support, particularly through the darkest times.

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.

In the case of Apple, they did originally do production internally, but then along came unbelievably good outsourced manufacturing from companies like Foxconn. We don't have that in the rocket business. There's no Foxconn in the rocket business.

I was born in Africa. I came to California because it's really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don't see a viable competitor.

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It's the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

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.

Some people don't like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.

The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it's going to become multiplanetary, or it's going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there's going to be an extinction event.

Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It's hard to break into a network once it's formed.

You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.

I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don't retire before I go senile, then I'll do more damage than good at that point.

People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.

I wouldn't say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I'd like my fear emotion to be less because it's very distracting and fries my nervous system.

If anyone thinks they'd rather be in a different part of history, they're probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You'd probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.

If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.

The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn't even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we'd never have had the light bulb.

I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don't believe in the whole thing of just using other people's money. I don't think that's right. I'm not going to ask other people to invest in something if I'm not prepared to do so myself.

I think there are more politicians in favor of electric cars than against. There are still some that are against, and I think the reasoning for that varies depending on the person, but in some cases, they just don't believe in climate change - they think oil will last forever.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far - the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done.

My opinion is it's a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.

If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

In order for us to have a future that's exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we're a space-bearing civilization.

The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.

As you heat the planet up, it's just like boiling a pot.

I've been to Disneyland, like, 10 times. I'm getting really tired of Disneyland.

I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.

A Prius is not a true hybrid, really. The current Prius is, like, 2 percent electric. It's a gasoline car with slightly better mileage.

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive.

Great companies are built on great products.

Mars is the only place in the solar system where it's possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

I think long term you can see Tesla establishing factories in Europe, in other parts of the U.S. and in Asia.

I'm personally a moderate and a registered independent, so I'm not strongly Democratic or strongly Republican.

In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.

I'm glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That's cool.

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Elon Musk - Biography - IMDb