@StartupArchive_: Elon Musk explains why solar is the path to energy abundance “Solar is by far the biggest source of energy. On earth an…

Elon Musk explains why solar is the path to energy abundance

“Solar is by far the biggest source of energy. On earth and beyond earth, the sun rounds up to 100% of all energy. This is an important thing to consider. The sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Jupiter is about 0.1% and everything else is miscellaneous. Even if you were to burn Jupiter in a thermonuclear reactor, the amount of energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100%… So it’s really all about the sun.”

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink asks Elon what it would take to electrify the United States with solar power. Elon replies:

“The rough way to think about it is: 100 miles x 100 miles of solar is enough to power the entire United States. You could basically take a small corner of Utah or Nevada or New Mexico — obviously you wouldn’t want it all in one place — but it’s a very small percentage of the area of the U.S. to generate all of the electricity the U.S. uses.”

He continues:

“The same is true for Europe. You could take relatively small, unpopulated areas of Spain and Sicily and generate all of the electricity power that Europe needs.”

Source: @CNBC (Jan 2026)

a16z (@a16z): “In 2018, Zach Dell was a summer analyst at Blackstone studying the utility-scale battery opportunity. ‘One thing became really clear to me,’ he recalls. ‘The marginal cost of solar plus storage was going to fall below the marginal cost of coal and natural gas.’

He was right.