I'm interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you're like, 'Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?'
— Elon Musk
Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.
The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.
SpaceX has the potential of saving the U.S. government $1 billion a year. We are opposed to creating an entrenched monopoly with no realistic means for anyone to compete.
If anyone thinks they'd rather be in a different part of history, they're probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You'd probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.
Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.
It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.
In the case of Apple, they did originally do production internally, but then along came unbelievably good outsourced manufacturing from companies like Foxconn. We don't have that in the rocket business. There's no Foxconn in the rocket business.
I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.
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.
The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.
The rumours of the demise of the U.S. manufacturing industry are greatly exaggerated.
I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.
I've been to Disneyland, like, 10 times. I'm getting really tired of Disneyland.
Mars is the only place in the solar system where it's possible for life to become multi-planetarian.
It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don't think it's possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.
You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.
I usually describe myself as an engineer; that's basically what I've been doing since I was a kid.
An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.
As you heat the planet up, it's just like boiling a pot.
Rockets are cool. There's no getting around that.
Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.
I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple's product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.
I'm a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.
The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn't even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we'd never have had the light bulb.
If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth.
In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.
I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.
I wouldn't say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I'd like my fear emotion to be less because it's very distracting and fries my nervous system.
Tesla is becoming a real car company.
America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.
If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it's always expensive.
The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it's going to become multiplanetary, or it's going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there's going to be an extinction event.
It's obviously tricky to convert cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.
There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.
The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far - the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.
If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic - being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.
I don't spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.
If you had to buy a new plane every time you flew somewhere, it would be incredibly expensive.
Life is too short for long-term grudges.
Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It's hard to break into a network once it's formed.
I'm reasonably optimistic about the future, especially the future of the United States - for the century, at least.
Government isn't that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you've got to have commercial companies do it.
My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment - my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.
I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don't retire before I go senile, then I'll do more damage than good at that point.
I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It's the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.
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.
There's nothing - I've bought everything I want. I don't like yachts or anything; you know, I'm not a yacht person, and I've got pretty much the nicest plane I'd want to have.
The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.
