Be skeptical, question authority, be a rebel. Do not conform and don’t be ordinary. Remember, all human progress is the result of far-sighted people challenging orthodoxy, tradition and rich, powerful, vested interests.
To innovate is not to reform.
Elon Musk is an incredibly prolific entrepreneur, having come up with, or been at the founding team of Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, PayPal, all different industries that seem to have nothing to do with each other.
When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.
If you're entering anything where there's an existing marketplace, against large, entrenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs. It can't be a little bit better, because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer... you're always going to buy the trusted brand unless there's a big difference.
Traditional businesses can say, 'We're going to sell widgets to people, and it will make X amount of profit.' But new business models are hard.
Great institutions can only be reformed by stealth or by revolution.
Bitcoin represents the first major breakthrough in economics and finance since double-entry bookkeeping was invented in 1494, and activists need to embrace its power.
The only way you survive on all these services is if you're groundbreaking. There's pressure to be groundbreaking, which is the greatest thing that's ever happened. It's a bizarre aspect of what's happened with all of these subscription services is everyone is trying to outdo each other by doing great things.
With tough interpretation of taxi and zoning regulations, neither Uber nor Airbnb would have gotten started. By the time many cities recognized their existence, both were fairly large and had the political support of their customers.
The stock market clearly values companies that can deliver disruptive innovation.
Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.
A moderate tax on robots, even a temporary tax that merely slows the adoption of disruptive technology, seems a natural component of a policy to address rising inequality. Revenue could be targeted toward wage insurance, to help people replaced by new technology make the transition to a different career.
In a startup car company, everything you do has to be done in a different way than a traditional car company. And the main reason is that all of these big car companies are operating like giant well-oiled machines - you could put a very seasoned executive in, and all he has to do is make sure the machine keeps running.
The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve.
Both humanity's capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater today than at any other time in history.
There's a reason why start-ups, especially disruptive start-ups - like Google or Amazon or Uber - are full of young people. That's because young people are not as wedded to the old fashioned ways of doing things.
Unsurprisingly, the most vocal opponents of new technologies are those who dominated the old.
The future of innovation has to include not only the technology, but economic viability.
Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.
You don't do new things and try to change the system without generating debate.
The paradox explored in my book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' is that successful companies can fail by making the 'right' decisions in the wrong situations.
This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.
Leadership is happening, but it's not coming from the leaders of the old institutions. Everywhere you look, you see these extraordinary, sparkling new initiatives that are under way.
My view is there's no bad time to innovate.
