Elon Musk

Optimism, pessimism, f**k that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.

Great companies are built on great products.

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.

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

I’m nauseatingly pro-American. I would have come here from any country. The U.S. is where great things are possible.

Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell.

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.

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

It's a fixer-upper of a planet but we could make it work.

You need to live in a dome initially but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on. ... So it's a fixer-upper of a planet.

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It'll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn't been reusable.

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.

Obviously Tesla is about helping solve the consumption of energy in a sustainable manner but you need the production of energy in a sustainable manner.

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.

My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars - this is very important - so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there.

Winning 'Motor Trend' Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.

The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.

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 feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don't retire before I go senile, then I'll do more damage than good at that point.

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