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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It's really incumbent upon us as life's agents to extend life to another planet. I think that being a multi-planet species will significantly increase the richness and scope of the human experience.

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