Patience is a virtue, and I'm learning patience. It's a tough lesson.
I read books and talked to people. I mean that's kind of how one learns anything. There's lots of great books out there & lots of smart people.
If something's important enough, you should try. Even if you - the probable outcome is failure.
For my part, I will never give up, and I mean never.
Physics is a good framework for thinking. ... Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.
The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.
Focus on something that has high value to someone else, be really rigorous in making that assessment, because natural human tendency is wishful thinking, so the challenge to entrepreneurs is telling what's the difference between really believing in your ideals and sticking to them as opposed to pursuing some unrealistic dream that doesn't actually have merit, be very rigorous in your self analysis, certainly being extremely tenacious, and just work like hell. Put in 80-100 hours every week. All these things improves the odds of success
Great companies are built on great products.
Funded by the government just means funded by the people. Government, by the way, has no money. It only takes money from the people. Sometimes people forget that that's really what occurs.
You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.
You want to do things you’re passionate about but also are useful to other people.
Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.
You shouldn't do things differently just because they're different. They need to be... better.
We need to figure out how to have the things we love, and not destroy the world.
It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.
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.
There's a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.
Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.
I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.
I started SpaceX with the expectation of failure.
When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.
What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.
The extension of life beyond Earth is the most important thing we can do as a species.
One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree - make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.
As a child I would just question things.
