"If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth."

"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."

"I don't believe in failure. It is just the opportunity to start again with better information."

"Winning 'Motor Trend' Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry."

"Take risks now and do something bold. You won't regret it."

"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."

"It's not about the money. It's about the people you're working with, and how you're helping them."

"If something's important enough, you should try. Even if you - the probable outcome is failure."

"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."

"People should pursue what they're passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else."

"Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

"The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad."

"Rockets are cool. There's no getting around that."

"It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket."

"Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence."

"It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket."

"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."

"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 say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens."

"The only way to make a great product is to make a product that people want."

"If you're not failing, you're not innovating enough."

"I'm glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That's cool."

"The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative."

"I'd like to die on Mars. Just not on impact."

"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 first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur."

"SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company's lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people."

"I don't think it's a good idea to plan to sell a company."

"Government isn't that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you've got to have commercial companies do it."

"In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution."

"If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things."

"The fundamental good of society is not the state, it's not the politicians, it's the people."

"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."

"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."

"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 think it's possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary."

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

"I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact."

"The risk of starting a business is more than worth the reward."

"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."

"I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths and then reason up from there."

"I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration."

"I'm interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you're like, 'Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?'"

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

"You shouldn't do things differently just because they're different. They need to be better."

"Tesla is becoming a real car company."

"Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up."

"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."

"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."

"The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It'll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn't been reusable."