Programmers From The United States

"Holy flying fuck, that thing took off!"

"I suggest that you call people you know in Thailand, find out what’s actually going on and stop defending child rapists, you fucking asshole. He’s an old, single white guy from England who’s been traveling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya Beach, until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time. As for this alleged threat of a lawsuit, which magically appeared when I raised the issue (nothing was sent or raised beforehand), I fucking hope he sues me."

"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"

"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 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."

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

"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."

"We must pass the great filter!"

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

"There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,"

"The fundamental message that consumers should be taking today is that it's financially insane to buy anything other than a Tesla. It would be like owning a horse in three years. I mean, fine if you want to own a horse. But you should go into it with that expectation. If you buy a car that does not have the hardware for full self-driving, it is like buying a horse. And the only car that has the hardware for full self-driving is a Tesla."

"What this advertising boycott is going to do is, it is going to kill the company [...] And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company"

"First, you're going to have to live in transparent domes, but eventually, you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet. You can warm it up."

"Everything works in PowerPoint; but if you have the physical item or some demonstration software, that's much more convincing to people than a PowerPoint presentation or a business plan."

"[The quick way to warm the planet] Drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles."

"Only by breaking through to new paradigms of space travel will more than a handful of us ever get to Mars and make it a potentially livable place... Getting to Mars is too big an accomplishment for us to feel proud by just by swinging by. We are a nation of enterprise as well as exploration, and we're not about to go there without making something of it."

"Sending large numbers of people to explore and settle Mars in the decades ahead isn't inevitable, but it is entirely possible. The biggest challenge isn't the engineering and spacecraft, however difficult they may be. Instead, it's making sure that a sustained Mars campaign proceeds as a national priority, and that will happen only if the American people are behind it. We have the opportunity now to make this happen. We might not be so fortunate in the future."

"I'm trying to do useful things."

"Since our primary competitors [in space launch] are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable."

"I would like to die on Mars; just not on impact."

"Even if there's a zombie apocalypse, you'll still be able to travel using the Tesla Supercharging system."

"I plan to travel to Mars and make it my home. .. People should be traveling to Mars and doing it in our lifetime."

"One thing that is important is that, if you have a choice between a lower valuation with someone you really like, or higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about, take the lower valuation."

"They [Apple] have hired people we've fired. We always jokingly call Apple the "Tesla Graveyard." If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I'm not kidding. ... cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can't just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car. But for Apple, the car is the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough."

"We need to figure out how to have the things we love, and not destroy the world."

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

"In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a... collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing."

"Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond our little blue mud ball--or go extinct."

"It was obviously a big disappointment not to reach orbit on this flight ... The most important message I’d like to send right now is that SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward. We have flight four of Falcon 1 almost ready for flight and flight five right behind that. ... There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport. For my part, I will never give up and I mean never."

"The heroes of the books I read, The Lord of the Rings and the Foundation series, always felt a duty to save the world."

"So, I think the best analogy for rocket engineers, if you want to create complicated software, you can't run as an integrated whole, or run on the computer it's intended to run on, but, first time you run it, it has to run with no bugs. That's the essence of it. So ... we missed the mark there."

"This is the chance to fulfill a dream."

"I’m nauseatingly pro-American. It is where great things are possible."

"As life’s agents, it’s on our shoulders."

"I'd rather be optimistic and wrong; than pessimistic and right. .. We have planes, trains, automobiles and boats, ... What if there was a fifth mode?"

"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."

"I think it is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive."

"A great deal of bargaining power with suppliers. We are never locked in to anyone."

"My approach is simply to seek out very talented people, ensure that the environment at SpaceX is as motivating & enjoyable as possible and establish clear & measurable objectives."

"Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell."

"So even if a fire develops, it can't really attack the particularly vulnerable locations like the pneumatic system or the avionics or the engine bay. We want to be in the situation that even if a fire develops, the rocket just keeps going."

"Rocket engineering is not like ditch digging. With ditch digging you can get 100 people and dig a ditch, and you will dig it a hundred times as faster if you get 100 people versus one. With rockets, you have to solve the problem of a particular level of difficulty; one person who can solve the problem is worth an infinite number of people who can’t."

"Support freedom of speech in the UK!"

"If we can be one of the companies that makes it possible for humans to become a multi-planetary species, that would be the Holy Grail. It sounds a bit crazy but it's going to happen, and only if people build the means to do so. We're making progress toward a greater philosophical goal while building a sound business."

"I like to be involved in things that change the world. The Internet did, and space will probably be more responsible for changing the world than anything else. If humanity can expand beyond the Earth, obviously that's where the future is."

"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."

"It doesn’t do a great deal to advance the goal of humanity. I would pay $20 million not to spend six months in Russia. And besides this, my interest is how do we enable many other people to go to space, not necessarily me, personally."

"If we can build something that is capable of taking people and equipment to Mars, such that it can service a transportation infrastructure for humanity becoming a multi- planet species - which I think is a very, very important objective - then I would consider the mission of SpaceX successful, at that point."

"I think that is a mistake and results in cloudy judgment on important technical issues. They can't tell if something is really good or not, so they just do what everyone else does, assuming it to be the safe bet."