At some point, that risk-taking private capital can take over, and have patents and trade secrets and things that let them lead the way, which happened with the steam engine and some other things, although with energy, the time of adoption is a lot longer than it is with, say, IT products or even medical advances, like drugs and vaccines.

In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.

We [Corbis] make it so easy to call up images, whether art or people or beaches or sunsets or Nobel Prize winners.

The concept of this so-called "TerraPower reactor" is that you, in the same reactor, you both burn and breed. So, instead of making plutonium and then extracting it, we take uranium - the 99.3 percent that you normally don't do anything with - we convert that, and we burn it.

Rules broken today become norms tomorrow.

It’s been proven that of all the interventions to reduce poverty, improving agricultural productivity is the best.

There certainly is a case to be made that taxes should be more progressive.