“I could go and buy one of the islands in theBahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build andcreate a new company.”

“It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there i...”

“I think its important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because its like somethin...”

“I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I just try to think about the future and not be sad”

“You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on... So it's a fixer-upper of a planet.”

“My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.”

“For me, the two weeks between Christmas and Twelfth Night have come to be reserved for desultory reading. The pressure of the holiday is over, the weather outside is frightful, there are lots of le...”

“Frank Capra's grandson was a second Assistant Director on 'Christmas Vacation.'”

“I grew up so poor in Austria that we never took a vacation with my family.”

“I don't view Twitter as a promotional tool but as a really, really, really cool cocktail party.”

“I've come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces.”

“From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.”

“The only failure is not to try.”

“We decided to try in vitro, because both Peter and I felt we couldn't handle another failure. When I miscarried after that, we had to come to terms with the possibility that this wasn't meant to be.”

“I try to be cool with everybody, but sometimes, everybody just has different personalities, motives, and different characters.”