Money is only part of the reason. That's something you get at the end. I'm doing this because I think this is important. I'm 63, I'm a decent physicist and a decent businessman. I can't think of anything more significant that I can do with the rest of my life than to help make this a success. I use here the collective “we.”

This is way bigger than Lattice [Energy LLC]. This is way bigger than IBM. It's way bigger than the United States. This is just the beginning, in my opinion. I'm doing this because, if we can draw our last breath leaving the world a little bit better place than the one we came into, we did all right.

What I'd like to leave the audience with is something that came out of a book by Thomas Friedman, 2008, Hot, Flat and Crowded. I think Tom did a take-off on Archimedes, who said, "Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I can move the world."

Here's what Tom Friedman said:

"No single solution will defuse more of the Energy-Climate Era’s problems at once than the invention of a source of single-solution, abundant, clean, reliable, and cheap electrons. Give me abundant, clean, reliable, and cheap electrons, and I will give you a world that can continue to grow without triggering unmanageable climate change. Give me abundant clean, reliable, and cheap electrons, and I will give you water in the desert from a deep generator-powered well. Give me abundant clean, reliable, and cheap electrons, and I will put every petrodictator out of business. Give me abundant clean, reliable, and cheap electrons, and I will end deforestation from communities desperate for fuel and I will eliminate any reason to drill in Mother Nature’s environmental cathedrals. Give me abundant clean, reliable, and cheap electrons, and I will enable millions of the earth’s poor to get connected, to refrigerate their medicines, to educate their women, and to light up their nights.”