Abstract. We transfer a number of fundamental results about hypercyclic operators on locally convex spaces (due to Ansari, Bès, Bourdon, Costakis, Feldman, and Peris) to the non-locally convex situation. This answers a problem posed by A. Peris [Multi-hypercyclic operators are hypercyclic, Math. Z. 236 (2001), 779-786].During the past years much research has been done about hypercyclic operators; the article [6] contains a rather complete survey of results until 1999. A (continuous linear) operator T : X → X on a topological vector space X is called hypercyclic if it admits a vector x ∈ X having dense orbit Orb(x) = {x, T x, T 2 x, . . .} (x is then called a hypercyclic vector). The following theorem collects some of the recent fundamental results:Theorem. Let X be a locally convex space and let T : X → X be an operator.( A. Peris asked in [8] whether in (3) local convexity is really needed and we now show that it is indeed not:All parts of the Theorem hold for topological vector spaces. The only place in the proof of the Theorem where local convexity plays a role is the following lemma which, for hypercyclic operators, is due to P. Bourdon [3] (the complex case) and J. Bès [2] (the real case). Our proof for the non-locally convex case is quite similar to their arguments.