How Elon Musk's thinking about humanity's future evolved

„Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”

„We realized that the true problem, the true difficulty, and where the greatest potential is -- is building the machine that makes the machine.”

„If you think about the future of humanity, it's going to fundamentally bifurcate in two directions, all life as we know it. Either it's going to become multiplanetary, or it's going to be confined to one planet, until some eventual extinction event.”

„With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's sure he can control the demon. It doesn't work out.”

„Back in '95, there weren't very many people on the Internet, and certainly nobody was making any money at all. Most people thought the Internet was going to be a fad.”

„We showered at the YMCA and we were so hard-up that we only had one computer. The website was up during the day and I was coding it at night, seven days a week, all the time.”

„When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”

„The five things that I thought about at the time in college, quite a long time ago -- 25 years ago -- making life multi-planetary, accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, the internet broadly speaking, and then genetics and AI.”

„Somebody could say -- and in fact people do -- that battery packs are really expensive and that's just the way they will always be because that's the way they have been in the past. ... Well, no, that's pretty dumb.”

„I tend to approach things from a physics framework. Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, okay, let's look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”

„The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution.”

„Build sports car. Use that money to build an affordable car. Use that money to build an even more affordable car. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options.”