Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.

How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

If you’re entering anything where there’s an existing marketplace, against large, entrenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs. It can’t be a little bit better, because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer… you’re always going to buy the trusted brand unless there’s a big difference.

The X is an amazing car, but we kind of got carried away with the art and technology. Obviously, you want great art. You want great technology. But we did get a little distracted from our mission, which was to advance the cause of electric vehicles. And it probably delayed us a little bit with the Model 3 as well.

There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

The reason we wouldn’t make a seven-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit a price point, it’s because we don’t think you can make a great tablet with a seven-inch screen.

People concerned about inflation today tend to buy big houses and nice cars.

I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It’s done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

I don’t believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career.

Everyone knows that when you look at a television ad, you do not expect to get information. You expect to see delusion and imagery.

The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.

Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we’re not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

Tesla is becoming a real car company.

If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising then they wouldn’t have to advertise them.

The problem with car dealerships is you’ve already decided what you want to buy before you even go there, and you’re really just going there to talk through some annoying negotiation.

I’ve actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don’t mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.

Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they’re not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.

A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.