"Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution."

"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."

"I think you have to not be afraid to fail. You have to take risks."

"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."

"When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change 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."

"Great companies are built on great products."

"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."

"Life is too short for long-term grudges."

"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."

"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."

"I think we should explore the possibility of life on Mars, and make humanity a multi-planetary species."

"You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases."

"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."

"If you're not progressing, you're falling behind."

"If you don't try, you can never succeed."

"I don' believe in perfection. Perfection means that nothing changes."

"Some people don't like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster."

"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."

"Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment."

"I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I'm really good at email."

"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."

"You want to be a good person, but sometimes you need to have the courage to be ruthless."

"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."

"My opinion is it's a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars."

"You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve."

"If humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed."

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

"I'm reasonably optimistic about the future, especially the future of the United States - for the century, at least."

"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."

"It's not about the money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get done."

"I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done."

"My philosophy is to make things that are important and to do them right."

"I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done."

"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."

"In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate."

"I'm trying to think about the future and not be sad."

"I don't believe in taking right decisions. I take decisions and make them right."

"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."

"If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me."

"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."

"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."

"I could go and buy one of the islands in theBahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build andcreate a new company."

"The future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we're a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species."

"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."

"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."

"I think life on Earth must be more than just solving problems. It must be about having a purpose."

"I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side."

"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."

"Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world."