Tesla is becoming a real car company.

With Virgin, I’ve just loved creating things. And as a private company, I can get away with moving Virgin from records to airlines to train companies to space companies to whatever, without ever having to worry about analysts knocking the value of my stock.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

We, we – as I say, we go in and shake up other industries and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don’t understand the software parts of it. And so you really can’t make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple’s the only company that has everything under one roof.

FaceTime helps me a lot. I feel like I’m at home even though I’m not.

We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.

In California, we have some of the strongest consumer protection laws in the country. While it is easy to conceive of innovation and regulation as mutually exclusive, California is proof that we can do both. We can innovate responsibly.

As an entrepreneur, as an investor, I’m trying to be as educated as I can to where the progression of technological capability is going and what it does to these different categories that, me as an artist and an influencer, I can get involved and bring value.

The truth of Moore’s law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.

If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting.

You can’t say civilization don’t advance… in every war they kill you in a new way.

The last people with any ideas are young people.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

Apple took the edge off the word ‚computer.‘

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

For all the supporters of Tesla over the years, and it’s been several years now and there have been some very tough times, I’d just like to say thank you very much. I deeply appreciate the support, particularly through the darkest times.

I think television has had a vast, unbelievable impact on us.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That’s a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long.

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

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‚I could have thought of that‘ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

Research is creating new knowledge.

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.

Connectivity just can’t be a privilege for people in the richest countries. We believe that connecting everyone in the world is one of the great challenges of our generation, and that’s why we are happy to play whatever small part in that that we can.

I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement – it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.

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.

There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.

Computers double their performance every month.

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.

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

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

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

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

First, how do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new economy? Second, how do we make technology work for us, and not against us – especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change? Third, how do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?

Certainly there’s a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

Cameras aren’t guns. They can’t really hurt you.

In my day, there were no vet video games.

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

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

Health is certainly extremely important, and we’ve done a number of things at Facebook to help improve global health and work in that area, and I am excited to do more there, too. But the reality is that it’s not an either-or. People need to be healthy and be able to have the Internet as a backbone to connect them to the whole economy.

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

I’m an inventor.

I know when I grew up, it was, if it was daylight outside, get outside. Well, now, with the technological age of computers and everything, everyone’s inside virtually going everywhere they want to go, virtually having relationships, virtually traveling across the neighborhood, virtually going to that island.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.

The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, ‚Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?‘ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

I think a lot of things that are the norm, that are very systematic, don’t work.

Young people can create beautiful things.