Elon Musk

Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It's hard to break into a network once it's formed.

As you heat the planet up, it's just like boiling a pot.

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.

Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.

I usually describe myself as an engineer; that's basically what I've been doing since I was a kid.

Here in the West, people often don't like listening to their leaders, even if they are right.

From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.

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.

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.

I'm trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.

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.

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.

The factory is the machine that builds the machine.

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.

The pace of progress on Mars depends upon the pace of progress of SpaceX.

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 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.

If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it's always expensive.

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.

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.