"If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it's not."
"Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done."
"There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you
want to live. Why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does
not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing."
"I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better."
"I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself."
"The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced."
"It's not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it's a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we
run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the
atmosphere."
"Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment."
"When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked."
"If something's important enough, you should try. Even if you - the probable outcome is failure."
"With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and he's like, yeah, he's sure he can control the demon? Doesn't work out."
"I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I'm really good at email."
"When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor."
"I've actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority
of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don't mean hybrid, I mean fully electric."
"A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery."
"Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world."
"Yeah, well I think anyone who likes fast cars will love the Tesla. And it has fantastic handling by the way. I mean this car will crush a Porsche on the track, just crush it. So if you like fast cars, you'll love this car. And then oh, by the way, it happens
to be electric and it's twice the efficiency of a Prius."
"You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel
that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in
the first place."
"I'm glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market.
That's cool."
"Obviously Tesla is about helping solve the consumption of energy in a sustainable manner, but you need the production of energy in a sustainable manner."
"Some companies out there quote a start of production that is substantially in advance of when customers get their cars."
"Winning 'Motor Trend' Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry."
"I think long term you can see Tesla establishing factories in Europe, in other parts of the U.S. and in Asia."
"I don't think it's a good idea to plan to sell a company."
"You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on... So it's a fixer-upper of a planet."
"There are some important differences between me and Tony Stark,
like I have five kids, so I spend more time going to Disneyland than parties."
