I'd like to die on Mars, just not on impact.

This is a genuine and well-documented Elon Musk line, delivered in 2013 — he made the quip during his South by Southwest keynote that year and repeated the sentiment in an Inc. magazine profile by Chris Anderson published in June 2013, where he is quoted saying "I'd like to die on Mars, just not on impact." The remark is characteristic Musk: it pairs his serious, long-stated ambition to make humanity multi-planetary via SpaceX with self-deprecating humor about the risk of rocket failure, and he has returned to the joke publicly since, including in a 2025 appearance with Donald Trump. It has since been quoted straight in scholarly works on spaceflight, including Joan Johnson-Freese's 'Space Warfare in the 21st Century' (2016). The only real variation is cosmetic — the submitted version, "I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact," expands the contraction and splits the sentence, but it carries the identical wording and meaning and is itself widely printed. We found no evidence of any earlier speaker or competing origin, and the line traces cleanly to Musk in 2013.