While attending a conference event in Sun Valley, Idaho, Musk told reporters that he and his company did not yet know what caused the June 28 failure of a Falcon 9 rocket, which exploded a few minutes after liftoff. The rocket was carrying a Dragon cargo capsule filled with supplies for the International Space Station.

Asked when the company would launch again, Musk said he did not know. SpaceX has been certified for launching national security space missions, but must compete for contracts with the department of defense, which Musk said the company will do "hopefully later this year."

I think we need to understand exactly what went wrong and what needs to be done to fix it," Musk said of the June 28 anomaly in an interview with CNBC and other reporters. "We're going to be very deliberate about it. We want to look at, of course, what went wrong, but also take thorough review of the data and see if there were any near misses — could there have been something else that might have gone wrong and what we need to do to fix that."