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.

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.

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.

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.

The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.

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

The extension of life beyond Earth is the most important thing we can do as a species.