I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.
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 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.
If humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.
The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.
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 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.
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.
I'm glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That's cool.
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.
Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.
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.
The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.
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'm anti-tax, but I'm pro-carbon tax.
I think there are more politicians in favor of electric cars than against. There are still some that are against, and I think the reasoning for that varies depending on the person, but in some cases, they just don't believe in climate change - they think oil will last forever.
I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.
The goal of Tesla is to accelerate sustainable energy, so we're going to take a step back and think about what's most likely to achieve that goal.
If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.
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.
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.
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.
What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.
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.
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.
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.
A utility can handle up to 20% of production from solar and that helps the grid because it produces electricity when needed. Solar power peaks in the middle of the day and that's also when air conditioning is running and businesses are operating, so power production matches usage.
If you look at space companies, they've failed either because they've had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.
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.
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.
I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
