I think AI is probably the single biggest item in the near term that's likely to affect humanity.

I think working on AI and making sure its a great future, that's the most important thing I think right now, the most pressing item.

We're effectively superhuman but we are extremely bandwidth constrained in that interface between the cortex and that tertiary digital form of yourself and helping solve that bandwidth constraint would be I think very important for the future as well.

making life multi-planetary, accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, the Internet broadly speaking and then genetics and AI.

You can get a doctorate on many things that ultimately do not have a practical bearing on the world. And I wanted to just...I really was just trying to be useful. That's the optimization. It's like what can I do that would actually be useful.

Crazy if the objective was to achieve the best risk-adjusted return starting our company is insane.

It only gets better if smart people work like crazy to make it better. That's how any technology actually gets better. And by itself technology...if people don't work on it, it actually will decline.

there are many such examples in history so I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

Elon: Well first of all I actually think I feel fear quite strongly. So it's not as though I just have the absence of fear. I feel it quite strongly. But there are just times when something is important enough, you believe in it enough, that you do do it in spite of fear.

something that can be helpful is fatalism to some degree. If you just accept the probabilities, then that diminishes fear.

that maybe would make some progress if we could just move the ball forward even if we died maybe some other company could pick up the baton and keep moving it forward so that would still do some good.