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Elon Musk

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"Everything works in PowerPoint; but if you have the physical item or some demonstration software, that's much more convincing to people than a PowerPoint presentation or a business plan."

Elon Reeve Musk (born 28 June 1971) is a South African-born entrepreneur and business magnate resident in the United States. He is the founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer at SpaceX; early-stage investor, CEO, and Product Architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; president of the Musk Foundation; and owner of X Corp., formerly known as Twitter, Inc. With an estimated net worth of about US$195 billion as of November 2022, Musk is the wealthiest person in the world according to the Bloomberg billionaires index and the Forbes real-time billionaires list.

I have never been materially active in politics before, but this time I think civilization as we know it is on the line. If we want to preserve freedom and a meritocracy in America, then Trump must win.[1]
Trump supports a government efficiency commission to allow great things to be done, Kamala does not,We will never reach Mars if Kamala wins![2]
Politicians seem to forget that the money being spent is your money[3]

Quotes

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2005

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2007

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Unsourced

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  • Life is too short for long-term grudges.

From articles on Evan Carmichael's website

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From: The Wired Entrepreneur: The Early Years of Elon Musk', 2007.

  • I didn’t really expect to make any money. If I could make enough to cover the rent and buy some food that would be fine. As it turns out, it turned out to be quite valuable in the end.
  • I don’t have an issue with serving in the military per se, but serving in the South African army suppressing black people just didn’t seem like a really good way to spend time.
  • I think South Africa is a great country.
  • If you wanted to be close to the cutting edge, particularly in technology, you came to North America.
  • Tuition costs are outrageous. Fortunately, they gave me a scholarship…so I only had to cover living expenses, books, etc., by working.
  • One was the Internet, one was clean energy and one was space.

From: Zipping Forward: Musk Starts His First Company', 2007.

  • I could either watch it happen, or be part of it.

From: Lesson #1: Keep Your Operations Lean And Clean', 2007.

  • We could figure out ways with small aerospace companies to do a low-cost spacecraft and lander. But we could not find a way to do a low-cost launcher, unless we went to the Russians.
  • The answer was we thought it could be done.
  • There is nothing inherently expensive about rockets. It's just that those who have built and operated them in the past have done so with horrendously poor efficiency.
  • Falcon One is going to be the lowest cost per flight to orbit of any production rocket.
  • Which means we’re cheaper than the Chinese, cheaper than [the] Russians or anywhere else – and we’re doing it in the United States with American labour costs.
  • I think the reason it’s cheaper is, first of all, we are a private entity and we have a very lean system in here. What we have been able to do here at SpaceX is to cherry-pick, you know, the top one or two percent and give them, you know, capital to execute well and a clear mission, which is low cost, reliable access to space, and no other constraints.

From: Lesson #2: Commit To Failing In A New Way', 2007.

  • Well, I have tried to learn as much as possible from prior attempts.
  • If nothing else, we are committed to failing in a new way.
  • There’s a graveyard of prior attempts, a big graveyard. There’s probably some freshly dug graves just waiting to be filled. Our aspiration is to avoid that destination.
  • I think we’ve got the risks pretty well characterized. I think we are at least avoiding the mistakes that have been made in the past.
  • I think the rocket business is quite cyclic. There are a great many peaks and troughs.
  • Imagine creating a huge software program that can only be tested in little pieces on a computer that is slightly different from what it is supposed to run on. However, when you do run it as a whole on the actual computer for the first time, it must run almost flawlessly without a single significant bug. When is the last time you saw a software program do that?
  • When thinking about starting a business, I think it’s actually better to start in a trough and come to market in a peak, than the other way around. Frankly, if anything does, and it’s almost cliché, space has a long-term future.
  • I want to be able to make sure that we have enough capital to survive at least three consecutive failures. If you want to make a small fortune in the launch vehicle business, start with a large one.

From: Lesson #3: Make Your Mission Your Holy Grail', 2007.

  • The long term ultimate objective – the holy grail – is we would like to help make life multi-planetary.
  • We got to the moon, but have never done anything better since. I'm disappointed that we have not made more progress since Apollo. I don't even see a plan that says we're going to do better than Apollo to exceed that goal.
  • I like to be involved in things that change the world. The Internet did, and space will probably be more responsible for changing the world than anything else. If humanity can expand beyond the Earth, obviously that's where the future is.
  • If we can be one of the companies that makes it possible for humans to become a multi-planetary species, that would be the Holy Grail. It sounds a bit crazy but it's going to happen, and only if people build the means to do so. We're making progress toward a greater philosophical goal while building a sound business.
  • 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.
  • It doesn’t do a great deal to advance the goal of humanity. I would pay $20 million not to spend six months in Russia. And besides this, my interest is how do we enable many other people to go to space, not necessarily me, personally.
  • If we can build something that is capable of taking people and equipment to Mars, such that it can service a transportation infrastructure for humanity becoming a multi- planet species - which I think is a very, very important objective - then I would consider the mission of SpaceX successful, at that point.

From: Lesson #4: Use Innovation To Break Through Your Limitations', 2007.

  • We are used to things improving every year; we are used to having a better cell phone next year than this year; a better lap top. We are even used to some basic things, like we expect more from your car in next year’s model than last year’s model. But this is not the case in space; reliability and cost - those are the fundamental parameters of transportation - have not improved.
  • Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell.
  • So even if a fire develops, it can't really attack the particularly vulnerable locations like the pneumatic system or the avionics or the engine bay. We want to be in the situation that even if a fire develops, the rocket just keeps going.
  • A great deal of bargaining power with suppliers. We are never locked in to anyone.

From: Lesson #5: Tap Into Today’s Top Talent', 2007.

  • I think it is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive.
  • My approach is simply to seek out very talented people, ensure that the environment at SpaceX is as motivating & enjoyable as possible and establish clear & measurable objectives.
  • Rocket engineering is not like ditch digging. With ditch digging you can get 100 people and dig a ditch, and you will dig it a hundred times as faster if you get 100 people versus one. With rockets, you have to solve the problem of a particular level of difficulty; one person who can solve the problem is worth an infinite number of people who can’t.
  • I think that is a mistake and results in cloudy judgment on important technical issues. They can't tell if something is really good or not, so they just do what everyone else does, assuming it to be the safe bet.
  • We're adding a triple sign-off for all work done on the launch pad, on flight components, and flight critical GSE. You have a technician, a responsible engineer, and then quality assurance will sign the final, record all information, and take photographs of all the work that was done, and then make sure that all information is put into our quality assurance database, which is reviewed prior to launch.
  • Although I am new in the business, my team is not. I would say that, person for person, there has never been a better rocket company in existence, in history. I don’t think there has ever been a group this talented in one place, in one company, developing a rocket – ever.

From: From PayPal To Planetary Success: How Musk Is Changing The World One Company At A Time', 2007.

  • If you have millions of dollars it changes your lifestyle, and anyone who says differently is talking bullshit. I don’t need to work, from a standard of living point of view, but I do, you know. I work every day and on weekends and I haven’t taken a vacation for years.
  • This is the chance to fulfill a dream.
  • I’m nauseatingly pro-American. It is where great things are possible.
  • As life’s agents, it’s on our shoulders.

2008

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  • Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond our little blue mud ball--or go extinct.

2009

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2012

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  • When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
    • 18 March 2012 60 Minutes, season 44, episode 26
  • We need to figure out how to have the things we love, and not destroy the world.
  • In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a... collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing.
  • So, I think the best analogy for rocket engineers, if you want to create complicated software, you can't run as an integrated whole, or run on the computer it's intended to run on, but, first time you run it, it has to run with no bugs. That's the essence of it. So ... we missed the mark there.
  • One thing that is important is that, if you have a choice between a lower valuation with someone you really like, or higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about, take the lower valuation.
    • 17 July 2012 during interview with PandoDaily - Fireside Chat With Elon Musk

2013

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2014

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Foreword to Marc Kaufman's Mars Up Close

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2014 source Mars Up Close: Inside the Curiosity Mission. National Geographic. ISBN 978-1-4262-1278-9.
  • I plan to travel to Mars and make it my home.
    ..
    People should be traveling to Mars and doing it in our lifetime.
    • p. 9
  • Only by breaking through to new paradigms of space travel will more than a handful of us ever get to Mars and make it a potentially livable place...
    Getting to Mars is too big an accomplishment for us to feel proud by just by swinging by. We are a nation of enterprise as well as exploration, and we're not about to go there without making something of it.
    • p. 10
  • Sending large numbers of people to explore and settle Mars in the decades ahead isn't inevitable, but it is entirely possible. The biggest challenge isn't the engineering and spacecraft, however difficult they may be. Instead, it's making sure that a sustained Mars campaign proceeds as a national priority, and that will happen only if the American people are behind it. We have the opportunity now to make this happen. We might not be so fortunate in the future.
    • p. 13

2015

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  • They [Apple] have hired people we've fired. We always jokingly call Apple the "Tesla Graveyard." If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I'm not kidding. ... cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can't just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car. But for Apple, the car is the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough.

2016

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  • SpaceX's got 5,000 people. I get a lot of attention, but they are really doing the work.
  • It would be an incredible adventure. And life needs to be more than just solving every day problems. You need to wake up and be excited about the future
    • On "eyeing" for Mars, IAC 2016 meeting, presentation on sustainable Mars colonization.
  • I can be on my own private island with naked super models, drinking mai tais, but I'm not. I'm in the factory working my ass off, so I don't want to hear about how hard everyone else in the factory works.
    • Quoted in "Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century" (2021) by Tim Higgins

2017

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  • 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, and actually it will, I think, by itself degrade, actually. You look at great civilizations like Ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And then the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts. They forgot how to do it.
  • I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.
    • 3 October 2017 in DK Smithsonian, Journey: An Illustrated History of Travel, ISBN 978-1-4654-6414-9 (Page 343).
  • Rocket tech applied to a car opens up revolutionary possibilities.
  • I love Twitter. How much is it?

2018

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  • Holy flying fuck, that thing took off!
  • I don’t get the little ship thing. You can’t show up at Mars in something the size of a rowboat. What if there are Martians? It would be so embarrassing.
  • Never saw this British expat guy who lives in Thailand (sus) at any point when we were in the caves. Only people in sight were the Thai navy/army guys, who were great. Thai navy seals escorted us in — total opposite of wanting us to leave. Water level was actually very low & still (not flowing) — you could literally have swum to Cave 5 with no gear, which is obv how the kids got in. If not true, then I challenge this dude to show final rescue video. You know what, don’t bother showing the video. We will make one of the mini-sub/pod going all the way to Cave 5 no problemo. Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it.
  • I suggest that you call people you know in Thailand, find out what’s actually going on and stop defending child rapists, you fucking asshole.
    He’s an old, single white guy from England who’s been traveling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya Beach, until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time.
    As for this alleged threat of a lawsuit, which magically appeared when I raised the issue (nothing was sent or raised beforehand), I fucking hope he sues me.
    • 30 August 2018 e-mail to Ryan Mac of BuzzFeed with follow-up commentary about Unsworth, per 4 September 2018 article
      • this tweet from Ryan Mac has Mac claim "I did not agree to go off the record, and he never asked." however the screenshot of the e-mail shows that Musk precedes this private e-mail to him with "Off the record"
  • Off the record. We haven't had a conversation at all. I sent you an off the record email, which very clearly and unambiguously said "off the record". If you want to publish off the record comments and destroy your journalistic credibility, that's up to you. As for answering more questons, I would be happy to do so, but not with someone who just told me that they will not honor accepted rules of journalism.
  • People tend to think like, 'Why should electric vehicles have a subsidy,' but they're not taking into account that all fossil fuel-burning vehicles fundamentally are subsidized by the cost—the environmental cost—to Earth, but nobody's paying for it... We are going to pay for it, obviously—in the future we'll pay for it. It's just not paid for now.
  • if you assume any rate of improvement at all, then games will be indistinguishable from reality
    we could be in base reality
    this is just about probability
    there are many, many simulations
    you might as well call them reality, or multiverse
    they're running on the substrate ... that substrate is probably boring
  • Guardian is the most insufferable newspaper on planet Earth.
  • I don't think most people, even in the aerospace industry, like, know what question to ask. Like it took us a long time to even frame the question correctly. But once we could frame the question correctly, the answer was, I wouldn't say easy, but, the answer flowed once the question could be framed with precision. Framing that question with precision was very difficult.
    • 17 September 2018 regarding the BFR, during announcement of first private passenger on lunar mission
  • im actually cat girl here’s selfie rn
  • [Artificial intelligence] is just digital intelligence. And as the algorithms and the hardware improve, that digital intelligence will exceed biological intelligence by a substantial margin. It's obvious. Ensuring that the advent of AI is good, or at least we try to make it good, seems like a smart move. We're not paying attention. We worry more about what name somebody called someone else, than whether AI will destroy humanity. That's insane. We're like children in a playground. ... The way in which a regulation is put in place is slow and linear. If you have a linear response to an exponential threat, it's quite likely the exponential threat will win. That, in a nutshell, is the issue.
    ..
    Your probability of dying on Mars is much higher than earth. Really, the ad for going to Mars would be like Shackleton’s ad for going to the Antarctic: "It’s gonna be hard. There’s a good chance of death, going in a little can through deep space. You might land successfully. Once you land successfully, you’ll be working nonstop to build the base. So, you know, not much time for leisure. And even after doing all this, it’s a very harsh environment, so there’s a good chance you die there. We think you can come back, but we’re not sure." Now, does that sound like an escape hatch for rich people?
    ..
    No one should put this many hours into work. This is not good. People should not work this hard. They should not do this. This is very painful. ...it hurts my brain and my heart. ... This is not recommended for anyone. ... I just did it because if I didn't do it, then there was a good chance Tesla would die.
    ..
    I believe there’s some explanation for this universe, which you might call God.
    • 25 November 2018 Axios, season 1, episode 4

2019

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  • The fundamental message that consumers should be taking today is that it's financially insane to buy anything other than a Tesla. It would be like owning a horse in three years. I mean, fine if you want to own a horse. But you should go into it with that expectation. If you buy a car that does not have the hardware for full self-driving, it is like buying a horse. And the only car that has the hardware for full self-driving is a Tesla.
    • 22 April 2019 during the Tesla Autonomy Investor Day, at Tesla Headquarters in Palo Alto, CA
  • It’s so insane the way rockets work today. It would be like if you got a plane and the way you get to your destination is you bail out with a parachute over the city in question and your plane crash lands somewhere. That’s how rockets work today—with the exception of Falcon 9. This is completely bonkers.
    ..If it were to take longer to convince NASA and the authorities that we can do it versus just doing it, then [SpaceX] might just do it [ourselves]. It may literally be easier to just land Starship on the moon than try to convince NASA that we can.
  • Nuke Mars refers to a continuous stream of very low fallout nuclear fusion explosions above the atmosphere to create artificial suns. Much like our sun, this would not cause Mars to become radioactive.
    Not risky imo & can be adjusted/improved real-time. Essentially need to figure out most effective way to convert mass to energy, as Mars is slightly too far from this solar system's fusion reactor (the sun).
  • No, just like [Unsworth] didn’t clarify he wanted to sodomize me with a submarine. I didn’t think it required clarification, I think that would have been worse. If you called someone a motherf’er I don’t think you would have to clarify you don’t actually commit incest. It would sound disingenuous.
    • 3 December 2019 per CNN article exploring lawsuit from Vernon Unsworth

"Starship Update" talk at the SpaceX facility in Boca Chica, Texas on September 28, 2019

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  • According to the geological records, earth has been around for around 4.5 billion years, although it was mostly molten magma for about half a billion years... The sun is gradually getting hotter and bigger, and over time, even in the absence of global warming — the man-made stuff — the sun will expand and it will overheat the earth. My guess is probably... there is only several hundred million years left.... Basically, if it took an extra 10% longer for conscious life to evolve on earth, it wouldn't evolve at all, because it would have been incinerated by the sun. ... It appears that consciousness is a very rare and precious thing, and we should take whatever steps we can to preserve the light of consciousness, and the window has been open; only now after four and a half billion years is that window open, that's a long time to wait ... I'm pretty optimistic by nature, but there's some chance that window will not be open for long, I think we should become a multi-planet civilization while that window is open, and if we do the I think probable outcome for Earth is even better, because then you know Mars could help Earth one day. And so I think we should really do our very best to become a multi-planet species and to extend consciousness beyond Earth, and we should do it now. Thank you.
  • I have this mantra. It's called, "If a schedule is long, it's wrong. If it's tight, it's right." And I've just, basically just go recursive improvement on schedule, with feedback loop. "Did this make it go faster? OK. If it didn't, we're going to need to fix it." If the design takes a long time to build, it's the wrong design. This is the fundamental thing. Over and over, the tendency is to complicate things. And I have another thing which is, the best part is no part. The best process is no process. It weighs nothing, costs nothing, can't go wrong. So, as obvious as that sounds, the best part is no part. The thing I'm most impressed with, when I have the design meetings at SpaceX, is "What did you undesign?" Undesigning is the best thing. Just delete it. That's the best thing.

2020

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  • If somebody wants to stay in their house, that’s great. They should be allowed to stay in their house, and they should not be compelled to leave. But to say that they cannot leave their house, and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom.
    • 30 April 2020 quote by Susan Walsh, “Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Aren’t on the Same Page,” New York Times
  • This notion though, that you can just sort of send checks out to everybody and things will be fine is not true, obviously. Some have this absurd view that the economy is like some magic horn of plenty… that just makes stuff. There’s a magic horn of plenty, and the goods and services, they just come from this magic horn of plenty. And then if somebody has more stuff than somebody else, it’s because they took more from this magic horn of plenty. Now let me just break it to the fools out there: If you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff. If you don’t make the food, if you don’t process the food, if you don’t transport the food, medical treatment, getting your teeth fixed, there’s no stuff. We’ve become detached from reality. You can’t just legislate money and solve these things. If you don’t make stuff, there is no stuff.
    • 7 May 2020 on podcast with Joe Rogan
  • We [the United States] will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.
  • The extreme difficulty of scaling production of new technology is not well understood. It’s 1000% to 10,000% harder than making a few prototypes. The machine that makes the machine is vastly harder than the machine itself.

2021

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2022

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  • I'm talking about not having kids in the first place. That's the problem.
  • This is just my strong, intuitive sense ... that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization
  • Do you still have a half billion dollar short position against Tesla?
    Sorry, but I cannot take your philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change.
  • NBC basically saying Republicans are Nazis … Same org that covered up Hunter Biden laptop story, had Harvey Weinstein story early & killed it & built Matt Lauer his rape office. Lovely people.
  • Let’s try this then: the will of the people who live in the Donbas & Crimea should decide whether they’re part of Russia or Ukraine
  • You are assuming that I wish to be popular. I don't care. I do care that millions of people may die needlessly for an essentially identical outcome.
    Russia is doing partial mobilization. They go to full war mobilization if Crimea is at risk. Death on both sides will be devastating.
    Russia has >3 times population of Ukraine, so victory for Ukraine is unlikely in total war. If you care about the people of Ukraine, seek peace.
  • I still very much support Ukraine, but am convinced that massive escalation of the war will cause great harm to Ukraine and possibly the world.
    • (October 3, 2022; 7:47pm) tweet
  • I play the fool on Twitter and often shoot myself in the foot and cause myself all sorts of trouble . . . I don't know, I find it vaguely therapeutic to express myself on Twitter. It's a way to get messages out to the public.
    • Predicted dangerous changes in the Sun, as opposed to climate change caused by humans, are not considered likely to happen for 1 to 1.5 billion years.
  • Something will happen to Earth eventually, it’s just a question of time. Eventually the sun will expand and destroy all life on Earth, so we do need to move at some point, or at least be a multi-planet species. [...] You have to ask the question: do we want to be a space-flying civilisation and a multi-planet species or not? [...] It's a question of what percentage of resources should we devote to such an endeavour? I think if you say 1 per cent of resources, that's probably a reasonable amount.
  • I'm subject to literally a million laws and regulations and I obey almost 99.99 per cent of them. It's only when I think the law is contrary to the interest of the people that I have an issue.
  • The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right-wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society... That is why I bought Twitter. I didn't do it because it would be easy. I didn't do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love ... That said, Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences!
  • Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day.
  • We do
    • November 7, 2022 tweet in response to Tom Fitton saying "I wonder if @ElonMusk's @Twitter has tortious interference claims against the Left activist groups which are causing damaging advertiser boycotts of the platform?"
  • To independent-minded voters: Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic.
  • And lead us not into temptation …
    • November 20, 2022 tweet accompanying an image of a praying man captioned Donald Trump ignoring a woman censored by a Twitter logo
  • I wonder what Earth will be like 88 million years from now
  • Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
    As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
  • Is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn’t turn out to be true? So far they’ve all turned out to be true — if not more true than people thought.
    • “All-In” podcast, theme of show, “all things” with Chamath Palihapitiva, co-host (December 27, 2022)

2023

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  • The media is racist. For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they're racist against whites & Asians.
    Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America.
    Maybe they can try not being racist.
    • February 26, 2023 tweet about comments by cartoonist Scott Adams (26 February 2023), cited in article BBC News (February 27, 2023)
  • Better to talk to people than communicate via tweet.
  • Best way to fight misinformation is to respond with accurate information, not censorship
  • Blooper reel must be amazing.
  • Any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life
  • Now you can still satisfy the limbic instinct but not procreate. So we haven't yet evolved to deal with that because this is all fairly recent in the last 50 years or so before birth control.
  • I'm sort of worried that hey, civilization, if we don't make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization's going to crumble.
  • History is written by the victors. Well, yes, but not if your enemies are still alive and have a lot of time on their hands to edit Wikipedia.
    • Tweets/posts on 'X', as cited in [4] (September 19, 2023)
  • Instead of knowledge, schools pour poison into the ears of our children
  • We will have something that is, for the first time smarter than the smartest human. It's hard to say exactly what that moment is, but there will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you wanted to have a job for personal satisfaction. But the AI would be able to do everything. I don't know if that makes people comfortable or uncomfortable. If you wish for a magic genie, that gives you any wish you want, and there's no limit. You don't have those three wish limits nonsense, it's both good and bad. One of the challenges in the future will be how do we find meaning in life.
  • What this advertising boycott is going to do is, it is going to kill the company [...] And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company
  • Don't advertise. If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself [...] Go fuck yourself, is that clear? Hey Bob, if you're in the audience. That's how I feel, don't advertise.

2024

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  • SpaceX has roughly 6000 satellites and not once have we had to maneuver around a UFO.
    • [6] (May 6, 2024)
  • Civilization is rare. We should do everything possible to save it.
    • [7] (May 6, 2024)
  • I would urge parents to limit the amount of social media that children can see because they're being programmed by a dopamine-maximizing AI.
    • [8] (May 23, 2024)
  • Great damage was done today to the public’s faith in the American legal system.
    • [9] (May 31, 2024)
  • If a former President can be criminally convicted over such a trivial matter – motivated by politics, rather than justice – then anyone is at risk of a similar fate.
  • DEI kills art.
  • The Dems want to take your kids
    • [12] (September 14, 2024)

Quotes about Musk

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In alphabetical order by author or source.
  • No doubt Elon Musk expresses a lot and has a massive public presence, he mostly talks about his ideas and thoughts. His communication is informative, full of deep and highly technical knowledge, about a lot of research, his future vision, theoretical principles, the progress of his adventures, etc. You will even find such complicated terms and figures — neurons, escape velocities, wavelengths, micro-chips, 8ch per threads, 27.5 um, stim resolutions, die size, which are difficult to be understood by those not having physics background. His penchant for thoughts and ideas confirms his introversion.
  • Thinking is a clearly visible trait of Elon Musk. Thinking helps him to subjectively make sense of things and understand the underlying principles. It enables him to differentiate relevant from irrelevant, useful from useless, and workable from non-workable. In fact, Elon Musk is a spontaneous and fast thinker due to which he can understand almost everything that he encounters in his field. He knows the complete science of cars, space vehicles, artificial intelligence, computers, and programs.
  • [T]here needs to be clarity on the nature of the problem. Lies can indeed kill and, though there are of course many others, one of the world's most prolific enemies of truth is Elon Musk. He is surely the global far right’s most significant figure, and he holds the world’s largest megaphone. As he may put it, a battle to defeat him is now inevitable – and it has to be won.
  • What happened next was extraordinary. Almost immediately, a number of notorious antisemitic accounts posted under the hashtag #BanTheADL. Musk boosted the campaign by liking a post by a far-right activist that called for banning the A.D.L. and then started his own campaign against the organization. In a series of posts on X, he blamed it for most of X's loss in advertising revenue, called the A.D.L. the biggest generator of antisemitism on X, proposed a poll on booting the A.D.L. from the platform and then threatened to sue the A.D.L. for defamation.
  • "I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary," as Musk famously said in 2008. In the 15 years since, he has revolutionised electric transport, broken world records in space travel, become the wealthiest person in the world, and made more headlines in a week than most tech CEOs make in their careers.
  • In October, David Beasley, head of the U.N. food agency, tweeted a cheeky congratulations to Musk for reportedly earning $36 billion in a single day. "1/6 of your one-day increase would save 42 million lives that are knocking on famine's door," he wrote... Musk tweeted: "If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it." ...Beasley quickly clarified that his earlier tweet referred to feeding "people on the brink of starvation" and not solving world hunger, he invited Musk to meet "anywhere—Earth or space" to discuss the potential donation.
  • [S]ince Musk and Beasley first started their Twitter conversation, the total number of people at risk of famine has risen to 45 million... In response to Musk's request for details, Beasley tweeted him the math: "$.43 x 42,000,000 x 365 days = $6.6 billion." That's how much it would cost to provide one meal a day for one year to this population in need...The food aid, says WFP, consists of commodities such as rice, maize and high-energy biscuits. Elon Musk asked Twitter followers if he should sell Tesla shares. They said yes.
  • Russia's slant on the world appears to have penetrated Musk's mind and he is by far Bellingcat's most famous detractor. Bellingcat's Twitter account has periodically disappeared from site searches and Musk himself often retweets conspiracy theories about the group.
  • [Comments from Christo Grozev of Bellingcat cited by Luce] "Musk is extremely influential. He has a cult following and he's purveying falsehoods. Because of his image among his followers as someone who knows the truth that others can’t see, he is more dangerous than a Trump."
  • Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that 'free speech' is actually a $8/mo subscription plan.
  • Leon’s, I’ll tell you what, Elon, Elon, is not going to buy Twitter. … He’s got himself a mess. He said the other day, ‘Oh, I’ve never voted for a Republican.’ I said, ‘I didn’t know that. He told me he voted for me.’ So, he’s another bullshit artist. But he’s not going to be buying it.

See also

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  • Encyclopedic article on Elon Musk on Wikipedia
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