Elon Musk Quotes

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. Fear is a hard thing to deal with. I feel it quite strongly. If I think something is important enough, I'll make myself do it in spite of fear. But it can really sap the will. I hate fear, I wish I had it less. The tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but [...] once you do that, the rest is really easy. Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you're putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you're doing the same thing you know that you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve. I think that's an important thing to do, to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful. I always had an existential crisis, trying to figure out 'what does it all mean?' I came to the conclusion that if we can advance the knowledge of the world, if we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then, we're better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened. That's the only way to move forward. You want to do things you're passionate about but also are useful to other people. I think whenever something is - whenever there's something that affects the public good, then there does need to be some form of public oversight. The U.S. automotive industry has been selling cars the same way for over 100 years, and there are many laws in place to govern exactly how that is to be accomplished. If we're going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation. If we could do high-speed rail in California just half a notch above what they've done on the Shanghai line in China, and if we had a straight path from L.A. to San Francisco, as well as the milk run, at least that would be progress. The pace of progress on Mars depends upon the pace of progress of SpaceX. Here in the West, people often don't like listening to their leaders, even if they are right. I do think there should be some regulations on AI. It is true that SpaceX is partially a government contractor, but it would be unfair to say that SpaceX is entirely a government contractor. I care very deeply about the people at Tesla. I feel like I have a great debt to the people of Tesla who are making the company successful. I wish we could be private with Tesla. It actually makes us less efficient to be a public company. The X is an amazing car, but we kind of got carried away with the art and technology. Obviously, you want great art. You want great technology. But we did get a little distracted from our mission, which was to advance the cause of electric vehicles. And it probably delayed us a little bit with the Model 3 as well. So we originally expected to make about 35 gigawatt hours at the cell level and about 50 gigawatt hours at the module or pack level. Now we are expecting to do about 150 gigawatt hours in the same volumetric space as the original design. From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare. I have made the mistaken assumption - and I will attempt to be better at this - of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season. And that is my mistake. Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence. There's no better place in the world for technology start-ups than Silicon Valley; there's such an incredible well of talent and capital and resources. The whole system is set up to foster the creation of new companies. On one of the SpaceX flights, we had a secret payload: a wheel of cheese. We flew to orbit and brought it back, so it was the world's first 'space cheese.' It was, in part, a tribute to Monty Python. We polled Tesla owners, do you want autopilot disabled or not. Not one person wanted it disabled. That's pretty telling. If you look at space companies, they've failed either because they've had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think. I like the word 'autopilot' more than I like the word 'self-driving.' 'Self-driving' sounds like it's going to do something you don't want it to do. 'Autopilot' is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars. If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth. I usually describe myself as an engineer; that's basically what I've been doing since I was a kid. 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.