ELON, EXPLAINED
Library · In His Words

In his own words.

55 sourced quotes, searchable and tagged by topic.

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“Initial production is always very slow and follows an S-curve. The speed of the production ramp is inversely proportionate to how many new parts and steps there are. For Cybercab and Optimus, almost everything is new, so the early production rate will be agonizingly slow, but eventually end up being insanely fast.”
Elon Musk2026 January 20 Tesla
“Could be wrong, but I think AI5 will probably be the best inference chip of any kind for models below ~250B params. By far lowest cost silicon and best performance/Watt. AI6 will take that much further.”
Elon Musk2025 September 6 Tesla
“The Blindsight device from Neuralink will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see. Provided the visual cortex is intact, it will even enable those who have been blind from birth to see for the first time.”
Elon Musk2024 September 17 Neuralink
“This weekend, the @xAI team brought our Colossus 100k H100 training cluster online. From start to finish, it was done in 122 days. Colossus is the most powerful AI training system in the world. Moreover, it will double in size to 200k (50k H200s) in a few months.”
Elon Musk2024 September 2 SpaceXAI
“The Colossus 2 supercomputer for @Grok is now operational. First Gigawatt training cluster in the world. Upgrades to 1.5GW in April.”
Elon Musk2026 January 17 SpaceXAI
“Provided Dragon 2 demo missions go well, SpaceX is highly confident of being able to fly US astronauts in 2018”
Elon Musk2017 February 18 SpaceX
“It's an armored personnel carrier from the future, what Bladerunner would have driven.”
Elon Musk2019 October Tesla
“The first Starlink satellite direct to cell phone constellation is now complete. This will enable unmodified cellphones to have Internet connectivity in remote areas. Bandwidth per beam is only ~10Mb, but future constellations will be much more capable.”
Elon Musk2024 December 5 SpaceX
“That is the perfect name”
Elon Musk2024 August 14 Government
“This is a dream come true for me and everyone at SpaceX. It is the culmination of an incredible amount of work by the SpaceX team, by NASA and by a number of other partners in the process of making this happen.”
Elon Musk2012 May SpaceX
“I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.”
Elon Musk2013 Life
“Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.”
Elon Musk2022 March 26 Life
“As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending. The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”
Elon Musk2025 May 28 Government
“Grok is a maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct.”
Elon Musk2025 February SpaceXAI
“Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging...”
Elon Musk2016 December 17 Boring Company
“Join @xAI and help build a purely AI software company called MACROHARD. It's a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real! In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI.”
Elon Musk2025 August 22 SpaceXAI
“SpaceX Merlin architecture is simpler than staged combustion (eg SSME or RD), but it has world record for thrust/weight & thrust/cost engine. Raptor has better Isp, but I'm worried it may fall short on those two critical metrics.”
Elon Musk2019 February 21 SpaceX
“Our aspiration with the Model S was to show that an electric car truly can be better than any gasoline car, which is a critical step towards the widespread adoption of sustainable transport.”
Elon Musk2012 Tesla
“It's time to basically bring the Model S and X programs to an end with an honorable discharge.”
Elon Musk2026 January 28 Tesla
“Tesla believed Model Y can become not just a category leader, but also the best-selling vehicle of any kind globally.”
Elon Musk2021 October Tesla
“If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.”
Elon Musk2020 July 9 Neuralink
“sustainable abundance”
Elon Musk2024 Tesla
“Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming”
Elon Musk2022 August 26 Life
“What matters most about Powerwall 3 is that it can handle peak power of ~30kW, which is enough to handle dryers & air-conditioners. This means that a single Powerwall is now enough for most homes.”
Elon Musk2024 February 16 Tesla
“A year ago right here in Detroit we had delivered about 150 Roadsters, so VIN 1,000 is a humble but important milestone for us.”
Elon Musk2010 January Tesla
“Once in production, we expect that Cybercab will begin to replace the existing Model Y fleet and will be the largest volume vehicle in the fleet over time.”
Elon Musk2026 April 22 Tesla
“We're going to make this.”
Elon Musk2024 October 10 Tesla
“Tesla Semi starts high volume production this year”
Elon Musk2026 February 8 Tesla
“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great - and that's what being a space-faring civilization is all about. It's about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”
Elon Musk2007 SpaceX
“Starship rocket booster caught by tower”
Elon Musk2024 October 13 SpaceX
“The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy.”
Elon Musk2006 August Tesla
“Tesla will have a 2nm fab, and I can eat a cheeseburger and smoke a cigar in the fab.”
Elon Musk2026 January 6 Tesla
“Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.”
Elon Musk2018 April 13 Tesla
“If the ratio is high, you're an idiot.”
Elon Musk2023 Tesla
“Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
Elon Musk2022 October 4 SpaceXAI
“X Money early public access will launch next month”
Elon Musk2026 March 10 SpaceXAI
“I think there are really two fundamental paths. History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. The alternative is to become a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species.”
Elon Musk2016 September 27 SpaceX
“I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.”
Elon Musk2013 March SpaceX
“If one can figure out how to effectively reuse rockets just like airplanes, the cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a factor of a hundred.”
Elon Musk2011 September 29 SpaceX
“The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good.”
Elon Musk2016 July Tesla
“It's intended to be friendly, of course, and navigate through a world built for humans. We're setting it such that it is at a mechanical level, at a physical level, you can run away from it and most likely overpower it.”
Elon Musk2021 August 19 Tesla
“When you have a large fleet of vehicles, you can gather a lot of data about how the world works, and that data is incredibly valuable for training neural nets.”
Elon Musk2019 April 22 Tesla
“You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, okay, what are we sure is true? And then reason up from there.”
Elon Musk2013 Life
“The best part is no part. The best process is no process. It weighs nothing. Costs nothing. Can't go wrong.”
Elon Musk2023 Tesla
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
Elon Musk2018 March Life
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
Elon Musk2015 Life
“Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”
Elon Musk2012 June 15 Life
“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that.”
Elon Musk2014 October 24 SpaceXAI
“Our goal when we created Tesla a decade ago was the same as it is today: to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.”
Elon Musk2013 November 18 Tesla
“Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome, the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment.”
Elon Musk2013 August 22 Boring Company
“To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D, which means either flying cars or tunnels.”
Elon Musk2017 April Boring Company
“We need to make Mars seem possible, like it's something we can do in our lifetimes, that you could go.”
Elon Musk2022 February 10 SpaceX
“I want to make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it is something that we could do in our lifetime, and that you could go.”
Elon Musk2017 September 29 SpaceX
“The bird is freed.”
Elon Musk2022 October 27 SpaceXAI
“The first @Neuralink product is called Telepathy. Enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking. Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs.”
Elon Musk2024 January 29 Neuralink

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