I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

You can just reload, propel it and fly again. This is extremely important for revolutionizing access to space because as long as we continue to throw away rockets and space crafts, we will never truly have access to space.

I think it's 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 it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

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.

Winning 'Motor Trend' Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.

You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.

There's a fundamental difference, if you sort of look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars...compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.