The main component of wealth is knowledge, not capital. By creating new knowledge, and then instantiating it in products that are duplicated and distributed, Elon and his fellow entrepreneurs are engines of wealth creation and distribution.

If your motives are pure and greater than yourself, the world will conspire in its subtle ways to help you.

This short life is best spent in the arena, on something other than the mundane and insatiable self.

Don’t make the thing to make the money, make the money so that you can make the thing. Don’t get paid for work, get paid so that you can do your best work.

On a day-to-day basis, I wake up in the morning and ask, “How can I be useful today?”

I do not start companies from the standpoint of asking, “What’s the best risk-adjusted rate of return?” or what I think could be successful. I just find things that need to happen, and try to make them happen.

Successful entrepreneurs come in all sizes, shapes, and flavors. I’m not sure there’s any one particular trait that makes them. However, if there is one to focus on, it would be to have an obsessive nature about the quality of the product. In this context, being obsessive-compulsive is a good thing.

My way of dealing with mental problems is to make sure you really care about what you’re doing—and take the pain.

Look fear straight in the eye and it will disappear. The nature of fear is that people don’t look at it. Look at it directly and it will be gone.

Quitting is not in my nature. I don’t care about optimism or pessimism. Fuck that. We’re going to get it done.

Physics is law. Everything else is a recommendation.

In business and personal life, wishful thinking causes a lot of mistakes. You have to ask whether something is true or not. If something ever feels too easy or doesn’t quite make sense…it is probably wishful thinking.

Most people self-limit their ability to learn. It’s pretty straightforward—just read books and talk to people.

You can be smart within the context of the limits of the data you have, but unless you have a way to get more data, you can’t make progress.

Innovation is not the problem. Execution is the problem.

To make the right decisions, you need to understand something at a detailed level.

It is my firm belief that the separation of the workplace into “executives” and “employees” does not create a good working environment. We want to create a system of equality without artificial barriers, so someone can start as a trainee and one day lead the entire company.

If you don’t eat the glass, you’re not going to be successful.

My advice for somebody who wants to start a company: Bear in mind, the most likely outcome is failure. Reconcile yourself to that strong possibility, and only if you still feel compelled to, do it.

I think it’s a real weakness to want to be liked. A real weakness. And I do not have that.

Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software, or processes. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function.

Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic.

Simplicity is our mantra. It creates both reliability and low cost.

If you’re not adding deleted things back in 10 percent of the time, you’re clearly not deleting enough. Somewhat illogically, people often feel they’ve succeeded if they are not forced to put anything back in. But actually they have failed in a different way, because they’ve been overly conservative and have left things in there that shouldn’t be.

The most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize a thing that should not exist.

Whatever time you set, it’s not going to be less than that. It’s rare that something will ever get done faster than the schedule.

When we first started Zip2, our ambitions were quite low: make enough money to pay rent.

I’m trying to create an accurate mental model of reality.

If there were two options, and one wasn’t obviously better than the other, rather than spend time trying to pick which one was slightly better, we would just pick one and go. Sometimes we were wrong and picked the suboptimal path, but at least we moved fast.

I have made it a principle within Tesla that we should never attempt to make service a profit center. It does not seem right to me when companies make a profit off customers when their product breaks.536 The best way to experience service is, of course, to not need service.

If we charge for something, it is not because we want to make things more expensive; it’s because we can’t figure out how to make it less expensive.

We must be optimistic. There’s no point in being pessimistic. It just doesn’t help. My theory is you’d rather be optimistic and wrong about the future than pessimistic and right. If you’re pessimistic, you’re going to be miserable. Might as well enjoy the journey.

The first goal is to make the damn thing work—we’ll optimize it later.

The first step is to establish that something is possible, then the probability it will occur.

It is difficult to give away money effectively if you care about the money actually doing good, not merely having the perception of doing good.

Work on things that you find interesting, fulfilling, and that contribute some good to the rest of society.