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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.

-Elon Musk

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It's Obviously Tricky To

Elon Musk

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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.

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Fear Is A Hard Thing To Deal With. I Feel It Quite Strongly. If I Think Something Is Important Enough, I'll Make Myself Do It In Spite Of Fear. But It Can Really Sap The Will. I Hate Fear, I Wish I Had It Less.

Well, My Motivation Behind Tesla Is Really To Do As Much Good As Possible For The Environment And The Electric-vehicle Revolution. I Think There Is Still A Lot Of Work To Do And If We Were To Sell To A Big Company, I'm Not Sure It Would Progress At The Same Pace.

Electric Vehicles

What I'm Trying To Do Is To Maximise The Probability Of The Future Being Better.

Trying To Read Our Dna Is Like Trying To Understand Software Code - With Only 90% Of The Code Riddled With Errors. It's Very Difficult In That Case To Understand And Predict What That Software Code Is Going To Do.

I Think Long Term You Can See Tesla Establishing Factories In Europe, In Other Parts Of The U.s. And In Asia.

Focus On Something That Has High Value To Someone Else, Be Really Rigorous In Making That Assessment, Because Natural Human Tendency Is Wishful Thinking, So The Challenge To Entrepreneurs Is Telling What's The Difference Between Really Believing In Your Ideals And Sticking To Them As Opposed To Pursuing Some Unrealistic Dream That Doesn't Actually Have Merit, Be Very Rigorous In Your Self Analysis, Certainly Being Extremely Tenacious, And Just Work Like Hell. Put In 80-100 Hours Every Week. All These Things Improves The Odds Of Success

My Mentality Is That Of A Samurai. I Would Rather Commit Seppuku Than Fail.

The Fuel Cell Is Just A Fundamentally Inferior Way Of Delivering Electrical Energy To An Electric Motor Than Batteries.

Electric Motors

You Could Warm Mars Up, Over Time, With Greenhouse Gases.

Greenhouse Gases

It's Just Mind-blowingly Awesome. I Apologize, And I Wish I Was More Articulate, But It's Hard To Be Articulate When Your Mind's Blown-but In A Very Good Way.

It Was Obvious To Me That We Could Never Colonize Mars Without Reusability, Any More Than America Would Have Been Colonized If They Had To Burn The Ships After Every Trip.

Optimism, Pessimism, F**k That; We're Going To Make It Happen. As God Is My Bloody Witness, I'm Hell-bent On Making It Work.

I Realized That A Methane-oxygen Rocket Engine Could Achieve A Specific Impulse Greater Than 380.

My Opinion Is It's A Bridge Too Far To Go To Fully Autonomous Cars.

Starting And Growing A Business Is As Much About The Innovation, Drive And Determination Of The People Who Do It As It Is About The Product They Sell.

I Think That's The Single Best Piece Of Advice: Constantly Think About How You Could Be Doing Things Better And Questioning Yourself.

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.

Obviously Tesla Is About Helping Solve The Consumption Of Energy In A Sustainable Manner But You Need The Production Of Energy In A Sustainable Manner.

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.

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.

When Something Is Important Enough, You Do It Even If The Odds Are Not In Your Favor.

My Motivation For All My Companies Has Been To Be Involved In Something That I Thought Would Have A Significant Impact On The World.

Land On Mars, A Round-trip Ticket - Half A Million Dollars. It Can Be Done.

If You Think Back To The Beginning Of Cell Phones, Laptops Or Really Any New Technology, It's Always Expensive.

When We Got Tesla Going At The Very Beginning, If You Asked Me What I Thought The Odds Of Success Were, I Would Have Said Less Than 50%. I Would Have Said That Failure Is The Most Likely Outcome.

For Me It Was Never About Money, But Solving Problems For The Future Of Humanity.

Problem Solving

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.

We Need To Figure Out How To Have The Things We Love, And Not Destroy The World.

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 Eternality Remains Unpriced.

As You Heat The Planet Up, It's Just Like Boiling A Pot.

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.

Selling An Electric Sports Car Creates An Opportunity To Fundamentally Change The Way America Drives.

Some Companies Out There Quote A Start Of Production That Is Substantially In Advance Of When Customers Get Their Cars.

I Always Had An Existential Crisis, Trying To Figure Out ‘what Does It All Mean?’ I Came To The Conclusion That If We Can Advance The Knowledge Of The World, If We Can Expand The Scope And Scale Of Consciousness, Then, We’re Better Able To Ask The Right Questions And Become More Enlightened. That’s The Only Way To Move Forward.

Physics Is Really Figuring Out How To Discover New Things That Are Counterintuitive, Like Quantum Mechanics. It's Really Counterintuitive.

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.

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.

I'm A Silicon Valley Guy. I Just Think People From Silicon Valley Can Do Anything.

The Primary Means Of Energy Generation Is Going To Solar. It Will At Least Be A Plurality, And Probably Be A Slight Majority In The Long Term.

You Want To Have A Future Where You’re Expecting Things To Be Better, Not One Where You’re Expecting Things To Be Worse.

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.

I Would Like To Die On Mars. Just Not On Impact.

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Winning 'motor Trend' Car Of The Year Is Probably The Closest Thing To Winning The Oscar Or Emmy Of The Car Industry.

You Can Just Reload, Propel It And Fly Again. This Is Extremely Important For Revolutionizing Access To Space Because As Long As We Continue To Throw Away Rockets And Space Crafts, We Will Never Truly Have Access To Space.

Physics Is A Good Framework For Thinking. ... Boil Things Down To Their Fundamental Truths And Reason Up From There.

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.

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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.

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Failure Is An Option Here. If Things Are Not Failing, You Are Not Innovating Enough.

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I Think You Should Always Be Seeking Negative Feedback.

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Tesla Motors Was Created To Accelerate The Advent Of Sustainable Transport. If We Clear A Path To The Creation Of Compelling Electric Vehicles, But Then Lay Intellectual Property Landmines Behind Us To Inhibit Others, We Are Acting In A Manner Contrary To That Goal. Tesla Will Not Initiate Patent Lawsuits Against Anyone Who, In Good Faith, Wants To Use Our Technology.

Electric Vehicles

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I Think We Are At The Dawn Of A New Era In Commercial Space Exploration.

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You Should Be Innovating So Fast That You're Invalidating Your Prior Patents.

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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.

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Time Management

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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.

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.

Funded By The Government Just Means Funded By The People. Government, By The Way, Has No Money. It Only Takes Money From The People. Sometimes People Forget That That's Really What Occurs.

Really, The Only Thing That Makes Sense Is To Strive For Greater Collective Enlightenment.

The Key Test For An Acronym Is To Ask Whether It Helps Or Hurts Communication.

Any Product That Needs A Manual To Work Is Broken.

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Negative Feedback

Persistence Is Very Important. You Should Not Give Up Unless You Are Forced To Give Up.

You Have To Be Pretty Driven To Make It Happen. Otherwise, You Will Just Make Yourself Miserable.

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One Bit Of Advice: 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.

A Battery By Definition Is A Collection Of Cells. So The Cell Is A Little Can Of Chemicals. And The Challenge Is Taking A Very High-energy Cell, And A Large Number Of Them, And Combining Them Safely Into A Large Battery.

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 Increasingly Inclined To Think There Should Be Some Regulatory Oversight, Maybe At The National And International Level Just To Make Sure That We Don't Do Something Very Foolish.

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.

People Will Buy The Car Just Because It's A Great Car. We Want Them To Think It's Excellent Value For Money And Then, Oh Yeah, It Happens To Be Electric.

I Tend To Approach Things From A Physics Framework. And Physics Teaches You To Reason From First Principles Rather Than By Analogy.

The First Step Is To Establish That Something Is Possible; Then Probability Will Occur.

You Want To Do Things You’re Passionate About But Also Are Useful To Other People.

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.

The Reason We Should Do A Carbon Tax Is Because It's The Right Thing To Do. It's Economics 101, Elementary Stuff.

Great Companies Are Built On Great Products.

Life Is Too Short For Long-term Grudges.

Life Is Too Short

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'm Personally A Moderate And A Registered Independent, So I'm Not Strongly Democratic Or Strongly Republican.

If Anyone Has A Vested Interest In Space Solar Power, It Would Have To Be Me.

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.

I Could Either Watch It Happen Or Be A Part Of It.

Engineering Is The Closest Thing To Magic That Exists In The World.

If Humanity Doesn't Land On Mars In My Lifetime, I Would Be Very Disappointed.

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.

Mars Is The Only Place In The Solar System Where It's Possible For Life To Become Multi-planetarian.

To Our Knowledge, Life Exists On Only One Planet, Earth. If Something Bad Happens, It's Gone. I Think We Should Establish Life On Another Planet-mars In Particular-but We 're Not Making Very Good Progress. Spacex Is Intended To Make That Happen.

Talent Is Extremely Important. It's Like A Sports Team, The Team That Has The Best Individual Player Will Often Win, But Then There’s A Multiplier From How Those Players Work Together And The Strategy They Employ.

The Idea Of Lying On A Beach As My Main Thing Just Sounds Like The Worst. It Sounds Horrible To Me. I Would Go Bonkers. I Would Have To Be On Serious Drugs. I'd Be Super-duper Bored. I Like High Intensity.

I Always See What’s... Wrong. Would You Want That? When I See A Car Or A Rocket Or Spacecraft, I Only See What’s Wrong. I Never See What’s Right. It’s Not A Recipe For Happiness.

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.

I Think The High-tech Industry Is Used To Developing New Things Very Quickly. It's The Silicon Valley Way Of Doing Business: You Either Move Very Quickly And You Work Hard To Improve Your Product Technology, Or You Get Destroyed By Some Other Company.

With Artificial Intelligence We Are Summoning The Demon.

Artificial Intelligence

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.

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.

Tesla Is Here To Stay And Keep Fighting For The Electric Car Revolution.

It's Important That We Attempt To Extend Life Beyond Earth Now. It Is The First Time In The Four Billion-year History Of Earth That It's Been Possible, And That Window Could Be Open For A Long Time - Hopefully It Is - Or It Could Be Open For A Short Time. We Should Err On The Side Of Caution And Do Something Now.

Self-driving Cars Are The Natural Extension Of Active Safety And Obviously Something We Should Do.

Constantly Seek Criticism. A Well Thought Out Critique Of What You're Doing Is As Valuable As Gold

The Tough Thing Is Figuring Out What Questions To Ask, But […] Once You Do That, The Rest Is Really Easy.

There's A Real Opportunity To Have A Vertical Takeoff And Landing Electric Supersonic Jet.

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.

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.

You Want To Be Extra Rigorous About Making The Best Possible Thing You Can. Find Everything That's Wrong With It And Fix It.

Entrepreneurship

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.

We Have A Strict 'no A-hole Policy' At Spacex. And We Fire People They Are. I Mean, We Give Them A Little Bit Of Warning. But If They Continue To Be An A-hole, Then They're Fired.

I’m Nauseatingly Pro-american. I Would Have Come Here From Any Country. The U.s. Is Where Great Things Are Possible.

It Is Despairing To Consider That The Cost And Reliability Of Access To Space Have Barely Changed Since The Apollo Era Over Three Decades Ago. Yet In Virtually Every Other Field Of Technology, We Have Made Great Strides In Reducing Cost And Increasing Capability.

It's Ok To Have Your Eggs In One Basket As Long As You Control What Happens To That Basket.

In Order To Have Your Voice Be Heard In Washington, You Have To Make Some Little Contribution.

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.

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 Just Want To Retire Before I Go Senile Because If I Don't Retire Before I Go Senile, Then I'll Do More Damage Than Good At That Point.

Patience Is A Virtue, And I'm Learning Patience. It's A Tough Lesson.

Entrepreneurship Is Like Eating Glass And Walking On Hot Coals At The Same Time

Many Things Are Improbable, Only A Few Are Impossible.

I'm Glad To See That Bmw Is Bringing An Electric Car To Market. That's Cool.

The Rumours Of The Demise Of The U.s. Manufacturing Industry Are Greatly Exaggerated.

I Don't Create Companies For The Sake Of Creating Companies, But To Get Things Done.

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.

If You're Co-founder Or Ceo, You Have To Do All Kinds Of Tasks You Might Not Want To Do. If You Don't Do Your Chores, The Company Won't Succeed. No Task Is Too Menial.

There's A Fundamental Difference, If You Sort Of Look Into The Future, Between A Humanity That Is A Space-faring Civilization, That's Out There Exploring The Stars...compared With One Where We Are Forever Confined To Earth Until Some Eventual Extinction Event.

I Wouldn't Say I Have A Lack Of Fear. In Fact, I'd Like My Fear Emotion To Be Less Because It's Very Distracting And Fries My Nervous System.

It's A Fixer-upper Of A Planet But We Could Make It Work.

Even If There's A Zombie Apocalypse, You'll Still Be Able To Travel Using The Tesla Supercharging System.

There's A Tremendous Bias Against Taking Risks. Everyone Is Trying To Optimize Their Ass-covering.

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.

The Odds Of Me Coming Into The Rocket Business, Not Knowing Anything About Rockets, Not Having Ever Built Anything, I Mean, I Would Have To Be Insane If I Thought The Odds Were In My Favor.

In Almost Any Industry, If You're Passionate About Doing A Great Job And Making People That Buy Your Product Or Service As Happy As Possible, It's Really Fulfilling.

America Is The Spirit Of Human Exploration Distilled.

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 Don't Spend My Time Pontificating About High-concept Things; I Spend My Time Solving Engineering And Manufacturing Problems.

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.

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.

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.

We Need To Be Super Careful With Ai. Potentially More Dangerous Than Nukes.

My Family Fears That The Russians Will Assassinate Me.

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.

Target Launch Date For Falcon I Maiden Flight Is Halloween(october 31) From Our Island Launch Complex In The Kwajalein Atoll. For Potential Customers Out There, I Should Mention That Kwajalein Has Some Of The Worlds Best Scuba Diving And Snorkeling! It Is Literally A Tropical Paradise.

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.

In The Case Of Apple, They Did Originally Do Production Internally, But Then Along Came Unbelievably Good Outsourced Manufacturing From Companies Like Foxconn. We Don't Have That In The Rocket Business. There's No Foxconn In The Rocket Business.

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.

I Don't Think Very Highly Of Henrik Fisker. [...h]e Thinks The Reason We Don't Have Electric Cars Is For Lack Of Styling

I've Always Wanted To Be Part Of Something That Would Radically Change The World. . . . People Forget The Power Of Inspiration. All Of Humanity Went To The Moon With The Apollo Missions. The Issue Was Cost. There Was No Chance To Build A Base And Create Frequent Flights. That's The Problem I Would Like To Solve.

The Thing That's Worth Doing Is Trying To Improve Our Understanding Of The World And Gain A Better Appreciation Of The Universe And Not To Worry Too Much About There Being No Meaning. And, You Know, Try And Enjoy Yourself. Because, Actually, Life's Pretty Good. It Really Is.

If Something's Important Enough, You Should Try. Even If You - The Probable Outcome Is Failure.

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.

The Extension Of Life Beyond Earth Is The Most Important Thing We Can Do As A Species.

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Electric Vehicles

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.

Some People Don't Like Change, But You Need To Embrace Change If The Alternative Is Disaster.

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