Abstract: The first run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been a great success, most notably with the discovery of the Higgs boson. Despite the continued triumph of the Standard Model, critical questions remain unanswered about how nature works on small scales. As the most massive of all known elementary particles, the top quark plays a central role in many proposed extensions to the Standard Model that address some of these questions. A precise understanding of top quarks and their production and properties is therefore critical. In this talk, I will discuss the motivation and status of top quark physics at the LHC, presenting recent results from the CMS experiment. Additionally, I will give an outlook to the future upgrade of the LHC to higher luminosities (HL-LHC), and its resulting potential and challenges for the CMS experiment.