Elon Musk on Business Quotes

"You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that's wrong with it and fix it."

"Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death."

"Constantly seek criticism. A well-thought-out critique of what you’re doing is as valuable as gold."

"Great companies are built on great products."

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

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

"I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future."

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

"Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up."

"Starting a business is not for everyone. Starting a business - I'd say, number one is have a high pain threshold."

"The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur."

"Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. This improves the odds of success."

"You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable."

"You shouldn't do things differently just because they're different. They need to be better."

"Any product that needs a manual to work is broken."

"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."

"If you are trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion."

"Orders of magnitude matter. If you can make something ten times better, people will notice."

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

"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."

"Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind."

"The supply chain stuff is really tricky. It's the logistics that get you."

"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."

"Physics is a good framework for thinking. Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there."

"When you struggle with a problem, that's when you understand it."

"A business is a collective of people working together to create value."

"I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right."

"If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it."

"The goal of Tesla is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy, so we're going to take a step back and see what's best for that goal."

"I think it is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent."

"A company is a group of people organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating."

"The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking."

"My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone's talent and not someone's personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart."