If you're co-founder or CEO, you have to do all kinds of tasks you might not want to do. If you don't do your chores, the company won't succeed. No task is too menial.

I want to make rockets 100 times, if not 1,000 times better. The ultimate objective is to make humanity a multiplanet species. Thirty years from now, there'll be a base on the moon and on Mars, and people will be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets.

If anyone thinks they'd rather be in a different part of history, they're probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You'd probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.

Focus on something that has high value to someone else, be really rigorous in making that assessment, because natural human tendency is wishful thinking, so the challenge to entrepreneurs is telling what's the difference between really believing in your ideals and sticking to them as opposed to pursuing some unrealistic dream that doesn't actually have merit, be very rigorous in your self analysis, certainly being extremely tenacious, and just work like hell. Put in 80-100 hours every week. All these things improves the odds of success

So, there's quite a big keep-out zone, and when you factor the keep-out zone into account, the solar panels put on that area would typically generate more power than that nuclear power plant.

Even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.

It's just mind-blowingly awesome. I apologize, and I wish I was more articulate, but it's hard to be articulate when your mind's blown-but in a very good way.