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

Life is too short for long-term grudges.

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

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

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.

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

I think there should be regulations on social media to the degree that it negatively affects the public good.

If something's important enough, you should try. Even if - the probable outcome is failure.

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.

I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

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.

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 we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.

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.

People should pursue what they're passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

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.

Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.

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.

If I'm not in love, if I'm not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.

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.

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

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

I do think there should be some regulations on AI.

To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That's what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games - nothing like saving the world.

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

There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.

We're already cyborgs. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you, but the interface is through finger movements or speech, which are very slow.

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

I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

I'm interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you're like, 'Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?'

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

Great companies are built on great products.

There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

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

The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad.

If you're entering anything where there's an existing marketplace, against large, entrenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs. It can't be a little bit better, because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer... you're always going to buy the trusted brand unless there's a big difference.

If you don't have sustainable energy, you have unsustainable energy. The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy faster than it would otherwise occur.

If you go 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.

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

Rockets are cool. There's no getting around that.

Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

We can't have, like, willy-nilly proliferation of fake news. That's crazy. You can't have more types of fake news than real news. That's allowing public deception to go unchecked. That's crazy.

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

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.

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.

It's very important to like the people you work with. Otherwise, your job is going to be quite miserable.

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.

I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.

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.

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.

Particularly Instagram, people look like they have a much better life than they really do. People basically seem like they are way better-looking than they really are, and they are way happier-seeming than they really are.

The factory is the machine that builds the machine.

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

A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies.

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

A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery.

The goal of Tesla is to accelerate sustainable energy, so we're going to take a step back and think about what's most likely to achieve that goal.

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.