Company Founders

"I don’t get the little ship thing. You can’t show up at Mars in something the size of a rowboat. What if there are Martians? It would be so embarrassing."

"Holy flying fuck, that thing took off!"

"I love Twitter. How much is it?"

"Rocket tech applied to a car opens up revolutionary possibilities."

"Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors."

"I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen."

"People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it will, I think, by itself degrade, actually. You look at great civilizations like Ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And then the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts. They forgot how to do it."

"I can be on my own private island with naked super models, drinking mai tais, but I'm not. I'm in the factory working my ass off, so I don't want to hear about how hard everyone else in the factory works."

"It would be an incredible adventure. And life needs to be more than just solving every day problems. You need to wake up and be excited about the future"

"The probability of death is quite high on the first [human] mission [to Mars]."

"I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future."

"SpaceX's got 5,000 people. I get a lot of attention, but they are really doing the work."

"AI is much more advanced than people realize. ... Humanity's position on this planet depends on its intelligence so if our intelligence is exceeded, it's unlikely that we will remain in charge of the planet."

"That friggin’ outfit...they prostituted every goddamn thing I had. I had the greatest gravy in the world and those sons of bitches they dragged it out and extended it and wa­tered it down that I'm so goddamn mad."

"There's something inside of me that makes me want to help people, especially people who are having difficulty of some kind."

"I owe the public nothing."

"The first thing [in credit] is character … before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it.… A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom. I think that is the fundamental basis of business."

"[Credit] is an evidence of banking, but it is not the money itself. Money is gold, and nothing else."

"If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it."

"Well, I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do."

"I despise the rule of Rockefeller and Morgan as much as that of King or Kaiser, and am as outraged by Ludlow and Calumet as by Belgium."

"Only workers are forbidden to be internationalists. It’s perfectly proper for J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford; for the bankers, the munitions trusts, the chemical companies. It’s proper for scientists, stamp collectors, athletic associations, musicians, spiritualists, people who raise bees, to be internationalist – but not workers. Only the clasped hands of the workers across the boundaries are struck down in every country."

"the great fathers Jefferson, Lincoln and Jackson had given way to Carnegie, Morgan and DuPont."

"What J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were to the Age of Robber Barons, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, as well as digital moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are to the contemporary age of the rule of the 1%. Then as now, the super-rich used governments to write laws and rules to allow them to accumulate unlimited wealth; then as now, creating monopolies by enclosing the commons and killing competition is the strategy for becoming the 1%."

"It will fluctuate."

"James is an ass, and we won't be working with him again."

"We're way closer to The Matrix than people realize, It's not going to be The Matrix—The Matrix is a movie and it misses all the interesting technical subtleties and just how weird the post-brain-computer interface world is going to be.It turns out that your brain has really good interfaces for some things and really badly designed, kludge-y interfaces for doing other things. And, the fact that your immune systems gets involved in your perceptions of temperature means there are all sorts of weird parts of your brain that participate in the sensation of being cold, whereas things like your motor cortex or your visual cortex are much more tractable problems. And that's what I mean. We're going to learn a lot as we proceed as to what things work and what things don't, what things are valuable to people and what things are party tricks that don't really matter in the long run ... I think that it's an extinction-level event for every entertainment form that's not thinking about this."

"The real world will feel dull, flat, colorless, blurry compared to the experiences you'll be able to create in people's brains. ...People are going to decide for themselves if they want to do it"

"George Lucas should have distributed the "source code" to Star Wars. Millions of fans would create their own movies and stories. Most of them would be terrible, but a few would be genius."

"The original Half-Life took two years to create and Half-Life 2 took six years. That means Half-Life 3 would ship in approximately 2022. By which time we'll all be retired. With episodic content we can answer everybody's questions about what happened at the end of Half-Life 2, and we can do it in 18 months rather than 18 years."

"The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think It’s really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted."

"This isn't working."

"C'mon, people, you can't show the player a really big bomb and not let them blow it up."

"I'd like to thank Sony for their gracious hospitality, and for not repeatedly punching me in the face. If I seem a little nervous, it's because Kevin Butler was introduced to me backstage as the VP of sharpening things."

"You have to stop thinking that you're in charge and start thinking that you're having a dance. We used to think we're smart [...] but nobody is smarter than the Internet. [...] One of the things we learned pretty early on is "Don't ever, ever try to lie to the Internet – because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.""

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty."

"The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future."

"Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you’re able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power."

"Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around."

"If what you’re doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it’s probably not transformative enough."

"Having come from a totalitarian country, the Soviet Union, and having seen the hardships that my family endured–both while there and trying to leave—I certainly am particularly sensitive to the stifling of individual liberties."

"... whenever I have met with our elected officials they are invariably thoughtful, well-meaning people. And yet collectively 90% of their effort seems to be focused on how to stick it to the other party."

"We came up with the notion that not all web pages are created equal. People are – but not web pages."

"When it’s too easy to get money, then you get a lot of noise mixed in with the real innovation and entrepreneurship. Tough times bring out the best parts of Silicon Valley."

"re gmail, great user experience has helped other email systems (others have increased storage etc). there are areas that have been overlooked in industry, much as search was overlooked in the 90's. thinks they have technology, distribution infrastructure to address those things."

"The most frequently repeated statement by good, hard-working people since the Democratic and Republican conventions has been: "How stupid do they think we are?" … United teams win. Divided teams lose. Play to our multicultural strengths. Stop preaching the messages of hate and division in your campaign themes. And now, a message to both parties. Please remember that those who have participated in the United We Stand America movement are intelligent, thinking, responsible people. They are not unprogrammed robots who can be emotionally swayed by your negative ads or messages of fear and divisiveness. Bluntly, you will have to face the issues to get their votes. Mud wrestling and messages aimed at destroying your opponent and his loved ones won't work. I love the American people and I am sure that you do, too. I owe them a debt I can never repay and so do you. Today, their Government is a mess, and they want it fixed. By joining together as the owners of this great country, they can solve these problems. As I've said before, it is time to clean out the barn — join us — pick up a shovel. Get to work!"

"If I'm poor and you're rich, and I can get you to defend me that's good. But when the tables get turned, I would do my share. Right now we spend about 300$ Billion dollars a year on defense, Japanese spend around 30$ Billion in Asia, the Germans spend about 30$ Billion in Europe. For example, Germany will spend about a trillion dollars building infrastructure over the next 10 years. That's kinda easy to do if you don't have to pick up 30$ billion dollar tab to defend your country. The European community is in a position to pay a lot more then they have in the past....Now that they can [pay], they should."

"Few people in this country have been able to live the American Dream to the extent that I have … Neither political party has effectively addressed the issues that concern the American people."

"He’s like a throwback kind of character. He’s like an old American – there’s something about him that reminds you of the old America that I like very much."

"We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor,...have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south...when [Mexico's] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals."