The Book of Elon Quotes

“You are the magicians of the twenty-first century; don’t let anything hold you back. Imagination is the limit. Go out there and create some magic.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“We want to get to the point where we’re sending over a million tons at every Mars transfer window. Then we’re a serious civilization. A megaton per transfer window. We can’t fly there continuously, so we’d have a gathering of a thousand ships or more.944”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“We should not be afraid of doing something just because some amount of tragedy is likely to occur.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“The future of energy will be primarily solar with wind. We absolutely need stationary storage batteries because of the intermittency of both solar and wind. There will also be hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear—these are all good. Battery cell production is the fundamental rate-limiter slowing down a sustainable-energy future. Very important problem.834”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Regulators and legislators create new rules and regulations every year, but don’t put any effort into removing them.823 Without a cleansing function for rules and regulations, they accumulate every year. This is a problem.824 Eventually, we’re like Gulliver, tied down by thousands of little strings. You can’t move. No single one of those strings is the issue. The”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“We have to work to actively reduce the number of laws and regulations. Otherwise, as more laws and regulations are passed, eventually everything becomes illegal. You get into these Orwellian situations where going left is illegal and going right is illegal. There isn’t anything you can do that is legal.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“If I disagree with a regulation, it’s because I believe a regulation meant to do good does not actually do good. I believe it is my obligation to object to a regulation that does not serve the public good. That’s the only time I object.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“We already have a digital layer to our minds, in a sense, with our computer or our phone. You can access any book or song. You can ask a question on Google and get an answer instantly. With your laptop, you can outcompute an Empire State Building filled with people and calculators. These are incredible superpowers, which even the president of the United States didn’t have back in the year 2000.756 People don’t appreciate this yet—they are already a cyborg. You’re a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago, or even ten years ago.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“We’re building progressively greater intelligences, and the percentage of nonhuman intelligence is increasing. Eventually we humans will represent a small percentage of total intelligence. It might feel like we’re the biological bootloader for AI.747 We’re fairly close to artificial general intelligence, perhaps only a few years away. It’s possible we are on the event horizon of the black hole that is artificial superintelligence. Over a twenty- to thirty-year time frame, things could be transformed beyond belief. We probably won’t recognize society in thirty years.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Go do it. Just go out there and do it. People are far too afraid to try. Fear is the biggest reason for failure. Don’t be afraid to fail. Just go.727 If you don’t push for radical breakthroughs, you’re not going to get radical outcomes.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Even if some of the initial assumptions didn’t work out or the economics didn’t work out quite as expected, it would still be cool. If you come up with a new technology, it should feel like that. If you told a stranger, would they look forward to the day this new thing became available?”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“to go four or five layers down to find somebody actually doing real work—cutting metal, shaping atoms. Every level above that tacks on cost—it’s overhead to the fifth power. I began to understand why things were so expensive.616”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“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.594”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“I don’t look at ideas and ask, “What is the rank-ordered list of best business opportunities from a financial standpoint?” I look for problems that are important to fix for people now and for the future to be good.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“There are tons of books you can read, and if you can understand equations, you can design a rocket. Real easy. But making even one of these things and getting it to orbit is very hard.369 It’s the same thing for cars. It’s easy to make a car prototype; it’s hard to do car production.370 This is underappreciated. People think there is a “eureka” moment where you come up with an idea and that’s it. They believe design is the hard part and production is just making copies. That’s completely false.371”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“There’s an overallocation of talent in finance and law, especially in the United States. Too many smart people go into finance and law. This is both a compliment and a criticism. We should have fewer people doing law and finance and more people making stuff.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“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.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Your requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because you’re less likely to question them. Always question requirements, even if it came from me. Everyone is wrong some of the time.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“If you’ve got a whole bunch of separate parts and each of them has a given tolerance—even if that tolerance is tight, like 0.2 millimeter tolerance—but if you’ve got fifty parts…you have to multiply the variances together. You’ll end up with a huge variance between cars. That’s one of the reasons it’s better to combine parts rather than have more individual parts.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Problems get solved quickly when a person just talks to a person in another department and makes the right thing happen. Anyone can and should talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission. You can talk directly to a VP in another department. You can talk to me.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Many companies suppress their talented, driven engineers. Some are suppressed by being so comfortable they don’t produce much. There are a few places in Silicon Valley with good engineers—but what are they producing? The output of that engineering talent seems low, though maybe they are enjoying themselves. Tesla is not like that. We’re demanding. You’re going to get a lot done and it’s going to be cool work, but it’s not going to be easy. At Tesla, a superb engineer’s talents are used to a greater degree”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“If you’re going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype.246 When starting a company, create a demonstration, a mock-up, or a sketch. This helps people envision it. Try to get to that point as soon as possible, then iterate to make it as real as possible as fast as possible.247 It doesn’t sink in for people until you actually have a physical object they can use. Even when you can show something works on paper, and the calculations are clear, it’s not the same.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“There is never a shortage of ideas. I find ideas to be somewhat trivial, but the execution of good ideas is extremely difficult. Prototypes are easy; production is hard. Production and being cash flow positive is excruciating pain. Product ideas are nearly irrelevant.184”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“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. Galileo engineered the telescope, which allowed him to see Jupiter had moons. If you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. The limiting factor is the engineering. Therefore, you must address the engineering.163”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Develop good general knowledge, so you at least have a rough “lay of the land” of the full knowledge landscape. Read a broad range of material. How can you know what you’re really interested in if you’re not at least doing a broad, light exploration of the knowledge landscape?142”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“The Idiot Index.” How much more does a finished product cost than the cost of its materials? If a part or product had a high Idiot Index, we could cut the cost with more efficient manufacturing techniques.114”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“I think: “This is simply something important. It must get done. We will keep doing it or die trying.” I don’t need a source of strength for that. Quitting is not in my nature. I don’t care about optimism or pessimism. Fuck that. We’re going to get it done.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“First of all, I feel fear. It’s not as though I have the absence of fear. I feel it quite strongly. But when something is important enough and you believe in it enough, you do it in spite of fear.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“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.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success