It is also illegal to bid contracts below cost when the customer is the DoD.

Illegal is a very lose term...so many projects "overrun" their contract price...I don't believe that these companies that have decades of military and government contract experience cannot budget for overhead expenses and project delays. They just end up charging more later on, rather than be upfront with actual costs.

There is generally a fig leaf where the customer changes the requirements after the contract is signed. Partly because it's hard to define complex requirements ahead of time and partly because middle management always needs to leave their mark.

You wanted that to be blue ok, that's an extra 2 million.

So maybe they undercut all contracts except the DoD ones?

They were already colluding to form a monopoly, I don't think antitrust prosecutions are going to be forthcoming.

Well, they wouldn't exactly put it that way in the press release.

An alternate end-game would be ULA stringing together a few contract wins, pushing SpaceX to the brink, and then ol' Elon gets a nice offer from Boeing and Lockheed...

Elon plays the long game, and I don't think Boeing and Lockheed have any interest in going to Mars. He wouldn't sell from a moral standpoint.

I would be very surprised if Elon sells space X in the next ten years. Based on the book by ashlee at least.

Having read the exact same book I simply can't agree more. He has no reason to make a profitable company public seeing how much of a mess it has made things wtih tesla.