Innovation Quotes

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

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

I'm interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you're like, 'Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?

Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.

I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

I was born in Africa. I came to California because it's really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don't see a viable competitor.

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

I don't spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.

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.

If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it's always expensive.

I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.

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.

Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That's pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.

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

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.

I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It's a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that's what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

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.