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.
— Elon Musk
Winning 'Motor Trend' Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.
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.
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.
Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done.
Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.
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.
If something's important enough, you should try. Even if you - the probable outcome is failure.
Patience is a virtue, and I'm learning patience. It's a tough lesson.
I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I'm really good at email.
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.
I don't think it's a good idea to plan to sell a company.
Some companies out there quote a start of production that is substantially in advance of when customers get their cars.
I'm glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That's cool.
I've actually not read any books on time management.
My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars - this is very important - so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there.
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.
For all the supporters of Tesla over the years, and it's been several years now and there have been some very tough times, I'd just like to say thank you very much. I deeply appreciate the support, particularly through the darkest times.
Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.
If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.
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 long term you can see Tesla establishing factories in Europe, in other parts of the U.S. and in Asia.
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.
I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.
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.
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.
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.
I'd like to dial it back 5% or 10% and try to have a vacation that's not just e-mail with a view.
To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That's what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games - nothing like saving the world.
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.
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.
