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.

Does the logic connect? What are the range of probably outcomes? You want to figure out what those probabilities are and ideally be the House. It's fine to gamble, as long as you're the House. Also, listen to critical feedback, particularly from friends. Generally they will be thinking it but they won't tell you.

They were building a Ferrari for every launch, when it was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick.

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

I've actually not read any books on time management.

It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive.

I think long term you can see Tesla establishing factories in Europe, in other parts of the U.S. and in Asia.

Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.

I'm personally a moderate and a registered independent, so I'm not strongly Democratic or strongly Republican.

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 a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.

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 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.

I have made the mistaken assumption -- and I will attempt to be better at this -- of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season. And that is my mistake.

I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I just try to think about the future and not be sad.

If you don't have sustainable energy, you have unsustainable energy. The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy faster than it would otherwise occur.

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.

If we could do high-speed rail in California just half a notch above what they've done on the Shanghai line in China, and if we had a straight path from L.A. to San Francisco, as well as the milk run, at least that would be progress.

I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact.

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive.