Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is. OK? So, we’re going to reinvent the phone.

Whether one welcomes or deplores it, nothing is more surely and exactly characteristic of modern times than the irresistible invasion of the human world by technology. Mechanism invading like a tide all the places of the earth and all forms of social activity.

Move fast with stable infrastructure.

I’m often accused of being ahead of my time, but it’s simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

We’re already cyborgs. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you, but the interface is through finger movements or speech, which are very slow.

Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that ‚Oryx and Crake‘ is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it’s neutral.

Who wants a stylus. You have to get em and put em away, and you lose em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of. Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard.

And you know, I’ve had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.

SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company’s lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.

Imagination decides everything.

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

I don’t think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you’re willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn’t work. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, and if you’re going to experiment, you’re going to fail, and if you’re going to fail, you have to think long term.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

Computers make me totally blank out.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.

There are massive efforts on the part of the internet’s corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

Our goal is not to build a platform; it’s to be cross all of them.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus‘ success in the spreadsheet – basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

If you grew up, and you never had a computer, and you’ve never used the Internet, and someone asked you if you wanted to buy a data plan, your response would be ‚What’s a data plan, and why would I want to use this?‘

Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form.

I do think there should be some regulations on AI.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

The Internet is just another experiment showing us more sides of us.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

We want to make it so that anyone, anywhere – a child growing up in rural India who never had a computer – can go to a store, get a phone, get online, and get access to all of the same things that you and I appreciate about the Internet.

Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.

California is not just the Golden State. We are also the Internet State.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it’s like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

After launching the first version of Facebook for a few thousand users, we would discuss how this should be built for the world. It wasn’t even a thought that maybe it could be us. We always thought it would be someone else doing it.

Facebook are an amazing team, a brilliant team. It’s a technology that brings people together.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.

This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.

We all have our imperfections. But I’m human, and you know, it’s important to concentrate on other qualities besides outer beauty.

The goal of Tesla is to accelerate sustainable energy, so we’re going to take a step back and think about what’s most likely to achieve that goal.

We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‚crash‘ when we tried to use them.

We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.

The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

We’re taking all of the lessons that we have from New Shepard and incorporating them into New Glenn.

There’s no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

We polled Tesla owners, do you want autopilot disabled or not. Not one person wanted it disabled. That’s pretty telling.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.