Goldman Sachs Talks

Peter Diamandis, Creating the Future Through Technology

From mining asteroids to commercializing space exploration and developing large-scale genome sequencing, Peter Diamandis is an international pioneer in innovation. During a Talks at GS session, he discusses his revolutionary projects and creating the future through technology.

On incentivizing innovation: “We do our best work when we compete, right? We compete in sports, we compete in business – it would seem natural that we’d compete to solve problems, too. We’re just wired that way. [At XPRIZE Foundation], we put out a very clear goal, and the first person to pull this off wins. And society wins because we uplift everybody.”

On asteroids as an economic engine for space travel: “What’s really driven humanity to open up frontier after frontier has been resources. Over the last 15 years since 2000, there’s been a population of asteroids recently discovered that come very close to the Earth. You can extract fuel from these and have fuel depots for fueling the future economy of space.”