The first mistake in public business is the going into it.

Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity.

We’re running the company to serve more people.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

The greatest story of all is Colonel Sanders. He didn’t start until he was sixty-six on a freeway bypass for his chicken shop. Anything is possible!

The ‚public‘ scares me, but people I trust.

It wasn’t until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.

I like the city. I like the concrete. I like big business. I like being a CEO of my own company and having a lot of responsibilities. At the same time, when I can go off with a backpack or off on a surfboard or even off on a run somewhere in the woods – that’s where I’m really happy.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

I think you can give a pure artistic product if you understand how to build your own industry.

I’m a businessman as well as an entertainer. The reason why is because I want to own whatever I’m doing. I don’t want to work for other people forever.

It is just as important that business keep out of government as that government keep out of business.

In business, if you realize you’ve made a bad decision, you change it.

I’m touring the world, not doing nothing against the law, getting money to feed my family. I got employees that have felonies, and they can’t get jobs. They work for me.

Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.

I think business has to be stupider. I want to do really straightforward, stupid business – just talk to me like a 4-year-old. And I refuse to negotiate. I do not negotiate. I can collaborate. But I’m an artist, so as soon as you negotiate, you’re being compromised.

Over a 10-year period, 99 out of 100 new entrepreneurs will fail. Only one will be left standing as others get pushed out of the market or burn out from working so hard. It’s really sad.

I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.

I believe that we should own the fruits of our labor and the assets of our creations.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus‘ success in the spreadsheet – basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

Competitions are a business, first and foremost.

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.

I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.

Only the public can make a star. It’s the studios who try to make a system out of it.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.

I had been playing for a while, and I asked Louisville Slugger to send me a dozen flame treated bats. But when I got it, I realized they had sent me a box of ashes.

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

As an entrepreneur, I have been known for taking risks throughout my career, but leaving the European Union is not one of the risks I would want the U.K. to take – not as an investor, not as a father, and not as a grandfather. I am deeply concerned about the impact of leaving.

A live concert to me is exciting because of all the electricity that is generated in the crowd and on stage. It’s my favorite part of the business, live concerts.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

HartBeat Productions is a company established by me; it’s mine. I run it. I have employees.

Victory is a fleeting thing in the gambling business. Today’s winners are tomorrow’s blinking toads, dumb beasts with no hope.

America isn’t Congress. America isn’t Washington. America is the striving immigrant who starts a business, or the mom who works two low-wage jobs to give her kid a better life. America is the union leader and the CEO who put aside their differences to make the economy stronger.

Don’t go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you’ll land in trouble too big for you.

Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.

England is a nation of shopkeepers.

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: ‚Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.‘ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

In this business you have to develop a thick skin, but I’m always going to feel everything. It’s my nature.

I’m always amazed at how many people assume a business has to lose money before it makes money.

Wisdom stands at the turn in the road and calls upon us publicly, but we consider it false and despise its adherents.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.

If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.

I remember flying in, driving down 101 in a cab, and passing by all these tech companies like Yahoo! I remember thinking, ‚Maybe someday we’ll build a company. This probably isn’t it, but one day we will.‘

I do believe in the energy and the productivity of the American business world.

Two kids in their dorm room can’t start anything important in space today. That’s why I want to take the assets I have from Amazon and translate that into the heavy-lifting infrastructure that will allow the next generation to have dynamic entrepreneurialism in space, to build that transportation network.

It feels good being a restaurant owner because it’s part of my dreams of being the biggest mogul.

Percentage margins don’t matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.

In ‚Unfair Advantage: The Power of Financial Education‘ and ‚Why A Students Work for C Students,‘ I reveal the secrets of the wealthy and what schools will never teach you about money.

We, we – as I say, we go in and shake up other industries and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market.

I’m really interested in smells. I think I’d like to own a perfumery someday.

Leadership is influence.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

Let your Discourse with Men of Business be Short and Comprehensive.

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as ‚evil.‘ Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.

I just hate meetings. Though it’s true that once you’ve made a lot of money, people around you might be full of ideas about ways to make lots more money and might be disappointed that you don’t want to seize every opportunity to do so.

So I’ve seen life as one long learning process. And if I see – you know, if I fly on somebody else’s airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn’t in – 21 years ago, then I’d think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I’d like to fly on.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.