It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.
I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I just try to think about the future and not be sad
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.
I could go and buy one of the islands in theBahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build andcreate a new company.
My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.
Constantly seek criticism. A well thought out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold.
Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.
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.
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.
It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.
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.
I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.
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.
Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.
If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if you – the probable outcome is failure.
There’s a silly notion that failure’s not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
I’m glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That’s cool.
I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.
Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.
Selling an electric sports car creates an opportunity to fundamentally change the way America drives.
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.
I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.
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.
If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.
Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.
In order for us to have a future that’s exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we’re a space-bearing civilization.
What I’m trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.
If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.
It is theoretically possible to warp spacetime itself, so you’re not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but it’s actually space that’s moving.
So we originally expected to make about 35 gigawatt hours at the cell level and about 50 gigawatt hours at the module or pack level. Now we are expecting to do about 150 gigawatt hours in the same volumetric space as the original design.
Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.
People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.
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.
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.
Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.
You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.
Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.
In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.
When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.
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.
Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.
I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.
I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.
We’re running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere… can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.
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.
If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.
America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.
The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.
Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.
There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.
The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.
In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.
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?’
If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.
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.
If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.
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.
When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
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.
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.
My opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.
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.
We could definitely make a flying car – but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that’s super safe and quiet? Because if it’s a howler, you’re going to make people very unhappy.
Stationary storage will be as big as the car business long term. The growth rate will probably be several times what it is for the car business.
Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.
Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.
Winning ‘Motor Trend’ Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.
A Prius is not a true hybrid, really. The current Prius is, like, 2 percent electric. It’s a gasoline car with slightly better mileage.
I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.
Some companies out there quote a start of production that is substantially in advance of when customers get their cars.
I like the word ‘autopilot’ more than I like the word ‘self-driving.’ ‘Self-driving’ sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. ‘Autopilot’ is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.
The U.S. automotive industry has been selling cars the same way for over 100 years, and there are many laws in place to govern exactly how that is to be accomplished.
Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.
I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.
Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.
As you heat the planet up, it’s just like boiling a pot.
If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.
I’m reasonably optimistic about the future, especially the future of the United States – for the century, at least.
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.