Company Founders

"NBC basically saying Republicans are Nazis … Same org that covered up Hunter Biden laptop story, had Harvey Weinstein story early & killed it & built Matt Lauer his rape office. Lovely people."

"Do you still have a half billion dollar short position against Tesla? Sorry, but I cannot take your philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change."

"This is just my strong, intuitive sense ... that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization"

"This is not a way to make money.... I don't care about the economics at all."

"A good sign as to whether there is free speech is, "Is someone you don't like allowed to say something you don't like?""

"I'm talking about not having kids in the first place. That's the problem."

"I don't think we should try to have people live for a really long time. That it would cause asphyxiation of society because the truth is, most people don't change their mind. They just die. So if they don't die, we will be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn't advance."

"If you scare people enough, they will demand removal of freedom. This is the path to tyranny."

"We need to expand the scope and scale of consciousness so that we're better able to understand the nature of the universe and understand the meaning of life."

"I find history fascinating. There's a lot of incredible things that have been done, good and bad, that they help you understand the nature of civilization and individuals."

"For those wondering, I will pay over $11 billion in taxes this year."

"Bernie is a taker, not a maker"

"What happened here?"

"If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it. But it must be open source accounting, so the public sees precisely how the money is spent."

"Possibly, the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist."

"All designs are wrong, it's just a matter of how wrong."

"The extreme difficulty of scaling production of new technology is not well understood. It’s 1000% to 10,000% harder than making a few prototypes. The machine that makes the machine is vastly harder than the machine itself."

"We [the United States] will coup whoever we want! Deal with it."

"We must pass the great filter!"

"This notion though, that you can just sort of send checks out to everybody and things will be fine is not true, obviously. Some have this absurd view that the economy is like some magic horn of plenty… that just makes stuff. There’s a magic horn of plenty, and the goods and services, they just come from this magic horn of plenty. And then if somebody has more stuff than somebody else, it’s because they took more from this magic horn of plenty. Now let me just break it to the fools out there: If you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff. If you don’t make the food, if you don’t process the food, if you don’t transport the food, medical treatment, getting your teeth fixed, there’s no stuff. We’ve become detached from reality. You can’t just legislate money and solve these things. If you don’t make stuff, there is no stuff."

"If somebody wants to stay in their house, that’s great. They should be allowed to stay in their house, and they should not be compelled to leave. But to say that they cannot leave their house, and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom."

"I have this mantra. It's called, "If a schedule is long, it's wrong. If it's tight, it's right." And I've just, basically just go recursive improvement on schedule, with feedback loop. "Did this make it go faster? OK. If it didn't, we're going to need to fix it." If the design takes a long time to build, it's the wrong design. This is the fundamental thing. Over and over, the tendency is to complicate things. And I have another thing which is, the best part is no part. The best process is no process. It weighs nothing, costs nothing, can't go wrong. So, as obvious as that sounds, the best part is no part. The thing I'm most impressed with, when I have the design meetings at SpaceX, is "What did you undesign?" Undesigning is the best thing. Just delete it. That's the best thing."

"According to the geological records, earth has been around for around 4.5 billion years, although it was mostly molten magma for about half a billion years... The sun is gradually getting hotter and bigger, and over time, even in the absence of global warming — the man-made stuff — the sun will expand and it will overheat the earth. My guess is probably... there is only several hundred million years left.... Basically, if it took an extra 10% longer for conscious life to evolve on earth, it wouldn't evolve at all, because it would have been incinerated by the sun. ... It appears that consciousness is a very rare and precious thing, and we should take whatever steps we can to preserve the light of consciousness, and the window has been open; only now after four and a half billion years is that window open, that's a long time to wait ... I'm pretty optimistic by nature, but there's some chance that window will not be open for long, I think we should become a multi-planet civilization while that window is open, and if we do the I think probable outcome for Earth is even better, because then you know Mars could help Earth one day. And so I think we should really do our very best to become a multi-planet species and to extend consciousness beyond Earth, and we should do it now. Thank you."

"No, just like [Unsworth] didn’t clarify he wanted to sodomize me with a submarine. I didn’t think it required clarification, I think that would have been worse. If you called someone a motherf’er I don’t think you would have to clarify you don’t actually commit incest. It would sound disingenuous."

"They [Apple] have hired people we've fired. We always jokingly call Apple the "Tesla Graveyard." If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I'm not kidding. ... cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can't just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car. But for Apple, the car is the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough."

"I'm trying to do useful things."

"[The quick way to warm the planet] Drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles."

"First, you're going to have to live in transparent domes, but eventually, you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet. You can warm it up."

"Everything works in PowerPoint; but if you have the physical item or some demonstration software, that's much more convincing to people than a PowerPoint presentation or a business plan."

"Sending large numbers of people to explore and settle Mars in the decades ahead isn't inevitable, but it is entirely possible. The biggest challenge isn't the engineering and spacecraft, however difficult they may be. Instead, it's making sure that a sustained Mars campaign proceeds as a national priority, and that will happen only if the American people are behind it. We have the opportunity now to make this happen. We might not be so fortunate in the future."

"Only by breaking through to new paradigms of space travel will more than a handful of us ever get to Mars and make it a potentially livable place... Getting to Mars is too big an accomplishment for us to feel proud by just by swinging by. We are a nation of enterprise as well as exploration, and we're not about to go there without making something of it."

"I plan to travel to Mars and make it my home. .. People should be traveling to Mars and doing it in our lifetime."

"Even if there's a zombie apocalypse, you'll still be able to travel using the Tesla Supercharging system."

"Since our primary competitors [in space launch] are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable."

"I would like to die on Mars; just not on impact."

"One thing that is important is that, if you have a choice between a lower valuation with someone you really like, or higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about, take the lower valuation."

"I'd rather be optimistic and wrong; than pessimistic and right. .. We have planes, trains, automobiles and boats, ... What if there was a fifth mode?"

"So, I think the best analogy for rocket engineers, if you want to create complicated software, you can't run as an integrated whole, or run on the computer it's intended to run on, but, first time you run it, it has to run with no bugs. That's the essence of it. So ... we missed the mark there."

"In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a... collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing."

"We need to figure out how to have the things we love, and not destroy the world."

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

"The heroes of the books I read, The Lord of the Rings and the Foundation series, always felt a duty to save the world."

"Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond our little blue mud ball--or go extinct."

"It was obviously a big disappointment not to reach orbit on this flight ... The most important message I’d like to send right now is that SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward. We have flight four of Falcon 1 almost ready for flight and flight five right behind that. ... There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport. For my part, I will never give up and I mean never."

"As life’s agents, it’s on our shoulders."

"I’m nauseatingly pro-American. It is where great things are possible."

"This is the chance to fulfill a dream."

"If you have millions of dollars it changes your lifestyle, and anyone who says differently is talking bullshit. I don’t need to work, from a standard of living point of view, but I do, you know. I work every day and on weekends and I haven’t taken a vacation for years."

"Although I am new in the business, my team is not. I would say that, person for person, there has never been a better rocket company in existence, in history. I don’t think there has ever been a group this talented in one place, in one company, developing a rocket – ever."

"We're adding a triple sign-off for all work done on the launch pad, on flight components, and flight critical GSE. You have a technician, a responsible engineer, and then quality assurance will sign the final, record all information, and take photographs of all the work that was done, and then make sure that all information is put into our quality assurance database, which is reviewed prior to launch."