“I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.” It is one of the most shared Elon Musk quotes online. Here is where it comes from, and what was really at stake when he said it.
Musk said it in a 2012 interview with CBS News, according to the clip and transcript widely shared online. The interviewer asked whether he had thought about packing it in after the third failed launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket. His one-word answer was “Never.” The company’s first three launches had failed, and SpaceX had nearly gone bankrupt.
By 2008 the stakes were real. Musk told 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley that it was “the worst year of my life”, SpaceNews reported. A fourth failure, he said, would have been game over. He later told a conference that the fourth launch used the last money SpaceX had for Falcon 1, CNBC reported.
Saved in three days
On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 lifted off for the fourth time and reached orbit, becoming the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to do so. On December 23, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to haul cargo to the International Space Station. Two days later, on Christmas Eve, Tesla’s investors decided to put in more money, SpaceNews reported from the 60 Minutes interview.
Exactly 18 years after that fourth launch, SpaceX’s Starship reached orbit on September 28, 2026, and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, CNN reported. It was the first time the rocket deployed an operational payload.
Pelley summed up the 2008 period as Musk being saved in three days by two completely unexpected events. The quote shows the mindset, and the timeline shows how close it came. We also covered what Musk says makes him happy in our earlier story. The Falcon 1 flew five times in total before it was retired in favor of the Falcon 9.
