I'm personally a moderate and a registered independent, so I'm not strongly Democratic or strongly Republican.

You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.

America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.

I've been to Disneyland, like, 10 times. I'm getting really tired of Disneyland.

I wouldn't say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I'd like my fear emotion to be less because it's very distracting and fries my nervous system.

I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.

The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.

The rumours of the demise of the U.S. manufacturing industry are greatly exaggerated.

Government isn't that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you've got to have commercial companies do it.

Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It's hard to break into a network once it's formed.

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

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.

Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.

I usually describe myself as an engineer; that's basically what I've been doing since I was a kid.

Here in the West, people often don't like listening to their leaders, even if they are right.

From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.

We could definitely make a flying car - but that's not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that's super safe and quiet? Because if it's a howler, you're going to make people very unhappy.

If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.

I'm trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.

If we're going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.