I want to make rockets 100 times, if not 1,000 times better. The ultimate objective is to make humanity a multiplanet species. Thirty years from now, there'll be a base on the moon and on Mars, and people will be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets.

Let's think beyond the normal stuff and have an environment where that sort of thinking is encouraged and rewarded and where it's okay to fail as well. Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea... well a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you're not gonna get people coming up with ideas.

The biggest mistake, in general, I've made, is to put too much of a weighting on someone's talent and not enough on their personality. And I've made that mistake several times. I think it actually matters whether somebody has a good heart, it really does. I've made the mistake of thinking that it's sometimes just about the brain.

I always see what’s... wrong. Would you want that? When I see a car or a rocket or spacecraft, I only see what’s wrong. I never see what’s right. It’s not a recipe for happiness.

People will buy the car just because it's a great car. We want them to think it's excellent value for money and then, oh yeah, it happens to be electric.

The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it's going to become multiplanetary, or it's going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there's going to be an extinction event.

The rumours of the demise of the U.S. manufacturing industry are greatly exaggerated.