I was born in Africa. I came to California because it's really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don't see a viable competitor.

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

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

If you had to buy a new plane every time you flew somewhere, it would be incredibly expensive.

When we got Tesla going at the very beginning, if you asked me what I thought the odds of success were, I would have said less than 50%. I would have said that failure is the most likely outcome.

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.

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.