- 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.
- I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I'm really good at email.
- 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 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'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.
- 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.
- When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
- 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.
- If you go back 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.
- 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.
- 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 would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.
- 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 I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.
- 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 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 externality remains unpriced.
- 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 don't spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.
- Patience is a virtue, and I'm learning patience. It's a tough lesson.
- It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.
- Life is too short for long-term grudges.
- The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.
- 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've actually not read any books on time management.
- 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.
- 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.
- Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.
- 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.
- I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems... It's got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.
- I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.
- Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure - the law firms, the real estate, all that - that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It's a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that's what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.
- I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
- Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.
- I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.
- You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.
- It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.
- If humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.
- I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I've got kids and responsibilities, so I can't be my own test pilot. That wouldn't be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it's a sensible thing to do.
- Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.
- The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.
- America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.
- The rumours of the demise of the U.S. manufacturing industry are greatly exaggerated.
- 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.
- I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved.
- Automotive franchise laws were put in place decades ago to prevent a manufacturer from unfairly opening stores in direct competition with an existing franchise dealer that had already invested time, money and effort to open and promote their business.
- I'm anti-tax, but I'm pro-carbon tax.
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