On finding your own education
"My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment — my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.
"When I asked for an explanation, I got the true explanation of how things work. I also did things like make model rockets, and in South Africa there were no premade rockets: I had to go to the chemist and get the ingredients for rocket fuel, mix it, put it in a pipe."
On his childhood experiments
"It is remarkable how many things you can explode. I'm lucky I have all my fingers."
On his favorite book when he was a teen, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
"It taught me that the tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but that once you do that, the rest is really easy."
On vision
"Going from PayPal, I thought well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity? Not from the perspective, 'what's the best way to make money,' which is okay, but, it was really 'what do I think is going to most affect the future of humanity.'"
On (not) taking time off
"I did reasonably well from PayPal. I was the largest shareholder in the company and we were acquired for about a billion and a half in stock and then the stock doubled.
"So yeah, I did reasonably well, but the idea of lying on a beach as my main thing, just sounds like the worst — it sounds horrible to me. I would go bonkers. I would have to be on serious drugs. I'd be super-duper bored. I like high intensity."
On working hard
"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 workweeks and you're putting in 100 hour workweeks, then even if you're doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve."
On thinking rigorously
"[Physics is] a good framework for thinking. … Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there."
On the uselessness of process
"I don't believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that 'it's all about the process,' I see that as a bad sign.
"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."
On the importance of talent
"Talent is extremely important. It's like a sports team, the team that has the best individual player will often win, but then there's a multiplier from how those players work together and the strategy they employ."
On how to attract talent
"You have to have a very compelling goal for the company. If you put yourself in the shoes of someone who's talented at a world level, they have to believe that there's potential for a great outcome and believe in the leader of the company, that you're the right guy to work with. That can be a difficult thing, especially if you're trying to attract people from other companies."
On the importance of feedback
"Really pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it, particularly from friends. … Hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful."
On the necessary horror of starting a company
"You encounter issues you didn't expect, step on landmines. It's bad. Years 2 to 4 or 5 are usually quite difficult. A friend has a saying, it's 'eating glass and staring into the abyss' ...
"If you're cofounder or CEO, you have to do all kinds of tasks you might not want to do ... If you don't do your chores, the company won't succeed ... No task is too menial."
On not worrying too much about the swings of the market
"I mean, the market is like a manic depressive."
On opening up Tesla's patents
"Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.
"We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. ...
"We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla's position in this regard."
Tesla blog post, June 12, 2014
On flying cars
"I've thought about it quite a lot ... We could definitely make a flying car – but that's not the hard part ... The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that's super safe and quiet? Because if it's a howler, you're going to make people very unhappy."
On Henry Ford and innovation
"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."
On why the status quo is maintained
"There's a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering."
On when he first decided to go into space
"The thing that I got hung up on was the rocket. Getting there in the first place. The US options from Boeing and Lockheed were simply too expensive. I couldn't afford them. So, I went to Russia three times to negotiate purchasing an ICBM."
On aiming for Mars
"There's a fundamental difference, if you look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars … compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event."
On getting to Mars
"There will be those who can afford to go (to Mars), and those who want to go. I think if we can achieve that intersection, then it will happen … and, hopefully, it will happen before I'm dead."
On building a reusable rocket
"If humanity is to become multi-planetary, the fundamental breakthrough that needs to occur in rocketry is a rapidly and completely reusable rocket ... achieving it would be on a par with what the Wright brothers did. It's the fundamental thing that's necessary for humanity to become a space-faring civilization. America would never have been colonized if ships weren't reusable."
On the promise of America
"The United States — it's sort of like that comment about democracy — it's a bad system but it's the least bad. Well, the United States is the least bad at encouraging innovation."
On his philosophical outlook
"I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment."
