50 Best Elon Musk Quotes for Startup Founders

March 03, 2024

Elon Musk cofounded six companies: Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Co., Neuralink, Zip2, and PayPal. He is also the owner of Twitter—now called X.

Here are 50 of Elon Musk’s best quotes for startup founders:

  1. "I think it's very important to have a feedback loop where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better. I think that's the single best piece of advice. Constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself." — Elon Musk

  2. “If you’re building a company, you’ve got to gather great people. I mean, all a company is is a group of people that have gathered together to create a product or service.” — Elon Musk

  3. “I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.” — Elon Musk

  4. "People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working." — Elon Musk

  5. “I think it’s very important to actively seek out and listen very carefully to negative feedback. This is something people tend to avoid because it’s painful. But I think this is a very common mistake.” — Elon Musk (post)

  6. “If you can stay super focused on creating the absolute best product or service that really delights your end customer you have a better chance of succeeding… If your customers love you, your odds of success are dramatically higher.” — Elon Musk (post)

  7. “You need to work super hard…. If somebody else is working 50 hours a week and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of the year as the other company.” — Elon Musk (post)

  8. “People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.” — Elon Musk (post)

  9. “If you need inspiring words, don’t do it.” — Elon Musk

  10. "Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product." — Elon Musk

  11. "If you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about, take the lower valuation." — Elon Musk (post)

  12. "If you're not progressing, you're regressing; so, keep moving forward." — Elon Musk

  13. “My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.” — Elon Musk

  14. “I think the best way to attract venture capital is to try and come up with a demonstration of whatever product or service it is and ideally take that as far as you can. Just see if you can sell that to real customers and start generating some momentum. The further along you can get with that, the more likely you are to get funding.” — Elon Musk

  15. “Starting a business is not for everyone. Generally, starting a business, I’d say, No. 1 is to have a high pain threshold. When you first start a company, there’s lots of optimism and things are great. Happiness at first is high, then you encounter all sorts of issues and happiness will steadily decline, and then you will go through a whole world of hurt, and then eventually, if you succeed—and in most cases, you will not succeed—if you succeed then, after a long time, you will finally get back to happiness.” — Elon Musk

  16. "You want to have a future where you’re expecting things to be better, not one where you’re expecting things to be worse.” — Elon Musk

  17. “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” — Elon Musk

  18. “Great companies are built on great products.” — Elon Musk

  19. “I don’t spend time pontificating about high-concept things. I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.” — Elon Musk

  20. "When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor." — Elon Musk

  21. “If somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that’s a good thing. It doesn’t have to change the world…. Even if it’s just a little game or some improvement to photo sharing or something… Stuff doesn’t need to change the world to be good.” — Elon Musk (post)

  22. “Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.” — Elon Musk

  23. "It’s ok to have your eggs in one basket, as long as you control what happens to that basket.” — Elon Musk

  24. "If you’re a co-founder 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.” — Elon Musk

  25. “I wouldn’t say that I always knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I actually wasn’t sure what I wanted to do growing up. At one point I thought inventing stuff or creating things would be a cool thing to do. But I wasn’t really sure if that meant starting a company or whether that meant working for a company that made cool stuff.” — Elon Musk (post)

  26. "It's very important to like the people you work with, otherwise life and your job is gonna be quite miserable." — Elon Musk

  27. “If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.” — Elon Musk

  28. "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." — Elon Musk

  29. “You could reason by analogy and say the rocket is going to cost a certain amount because that’s what prior rockets have cost. Or you can say, well, what is a rocket made of? What are the material constituents? What do they weigh? What’s the cost per unit mass? And that sets the limit asymptotically for what a rocket can be. So if you can figure out some creative way to rearrange those elements into a rocket shape, then you can achieve a much better outcome.” — Elon Musk (post)

  30. "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." — Elon Musk

  31. "Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up." — Elon Musk

  32. “I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done." — Elon Musk

  33. "In the case of Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, and PayPal... it really stemmed from when I was in college and trying to think: what would most affect the future of humanity?" — Elon Musk

  34. “If you think about it, what’s the point of a company existing? The point is that it’s a group of people that have gathered together to create a product. If the product is good, the company should exist, and if it is not good, the company should not exist. That seems fundamental to the nature of companies. Clearly then one should focus on making the absolute best product you can. Otherwise you reduce the probability of success. But a lot of companies focus on things that aren’t really to do with the product. As though a company has any basis for existing apart from doing useful things. That’s kind of strange.” — Elon Musk (post)

  35. “You’ve got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. And so you end up working on problems that you’d really wish you weren’t working on” — Elon Musk (post)

  36. “When somebody has a breakthrough innovation, it is rarely one little thing. Very rarely, is it one little thing. It’s usually a whole bunch of things that collectively amount to a huge innovation.” — Elon Musk

  37. “A lot of times people think creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it’s really not that fun. There are periods of fun, and there are periods where it’s just awful. Particularly if you’re the CEO of the company. You actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company. There’s no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong that other people can’t take care of… The most pernicious and painful problems… Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss” — Elon Musk (post)

  38. “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.” — Elon Musk

  39. "Failure is an opportunity to learn again. We should not fear failure but learn from it." - Elon Musk

  40. “My motivation for all my companies has been to be involved in something that I thought would have a significant impact on the world” — Elon Musk

  41. “Any new technology is expensive when it starts out… Because the first thing that engineers are trying to do is make it work. And then when you make it work, you optimize, and you optimize, and you optimize.” — Elon Musk (post)

  42. “If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules” — Elon Musk

  43. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.” — Elon Musk

  44. “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 and lots of smart people.” — Elon Musk (post)

  45. “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.” — Elon Musk

  46. “Disruptive technology where you really have a big technology discontinuity… tends to come from new companies.” — Elon Musk

  47. “If you accept as a proposition that we don’t really understand the meaning of life and we wish to understand the meaning of life, then in order to understand the meaning of life, we should expand consciousness such that we can ask better questions, learn more, expand beyond the solar system, ensure that life on earth is good collectively for civilization. And then we can be less dumb about the nature of the universe and maybe we can answer some questions about where this all came from and where it’s going.” — Elon Musk (post)

  48. “Whatever the thing is that you’re trying to create, ask what would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect? So that’s why I think something that makes a big difference but affects a small or moderate number of people is great. As is something that makes even a small difference but affects a vast number of people… The area under the curve would actually be roughly similar for those two things.” — Elon Musk (post)

  49. “The thing to remember is that when companies are little, they’re like tadpoles. I mean, they just die very easily. You need to have an environment that tries to protect little companies and help them get bigger. Silicon Valley does that very well and America, in general, does that very well a lot of the time compared to other countries. Most other countries tend to foster and protect the big companies. Big companies don’t need protection.” — Elon Musk

  50. “What tends to happen is that it’s quite exciting for the first several months. Then reality sets in: things don’t go as planned; customers aren’t signing up; the technology or product isn’t working as well as you thought… It can be very painful for several years… Occasionally there are companies where there’s not an extended period of extreme pain, but I’m not aware of many.” — Elon Musk (post)

P.S. We’ve put together a YouTube playlist with every Elon Musk insight we’ve ever shared. You can watch it here: "Best startup advice from Elon Musk"