Elon Musk on Business Quotes

"Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Great companies are built on great products."

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

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

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

"If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it's not."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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