Let's not forget that the initial plan of SpaceX was to meet and get drunk with Russian leaders to buy missiles from them and resell them to US market.
Imagine the nightmare if it actually had worked as planned.
Regarding implementation in SpaceX, the success is mostly due to very good engineers and to a less bureaucratic process, where you can move fast and break things.
The NASA is a big boat that cannot steer due to political issues. It works ok but it is extremely slow and expensive.
The story I've heard is that he wanted to buy a single missile, but regardless.. where is the 'nightmare' in disarming Russia by buying up all their missiles in a firesale? It seems doubtful that such purchases would have effectively funded the construction of new missiles since Russia is/was so corrupt. I think the money would have gone into the hands of some oligarchs, and not been invested back into new missile development.
Even if that plan had gone through, it would have been child's play compared to the ESA and NASA as well as numerous western corporations buying rocket rides from Russia since the mid 90s up to the second Russian invasion of Ukraine a few years ago. Go down the lists of Proton launches on wikipedia and mouse over each of the payloads, you'll see that most of them since the mid 90s have been for American or European organizations. Even ULA and Orbital Sciences have bought hundreds of engines from Russia and used them to launch US payloads. I don't see many people raking them over the coals for this. Has this even proven to be a nightmare? Western money has kept Russia's space program alive, but has that funded any successful 'Wunderwaffes'? Russia's military is still running off the fumes of the Soviet Union and their supposedly amazing wonder weapons either don't exist or aren't relevant. Most of that money probably went up their noses.
Ah those pesky "political issues" commonly known as "process", "due diligence", or "laws".
These days it would be harder to pull something like that off, investors would be demanding better books from day one.
Currently, Tesla makes each car with a profit of almost 10k USD. That is insane compared to competitors, VW is at 973USD. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-teslas-unrivaled-pr...
It was really bad in the beginning, but now it's stellar, second only to Ferrari and other luxury cars. I don't like the guy, but this is not just luck.
There would have been other places for investors to stick their money.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4573601-tesla-gross-margins...
I don't see how that negates everything I said. Tesla can and does ship directly to buyers, so kudos to them.
Should SpaceX even threaten to go off the rails, the US government can and will seize it faster than Elon can go crying to the Supreme Court.
Space access is too much of a national security risk.
So he thought he is a genius and can make this one work too. He realized his mistake (tried to get off the deal) but when the deal stuck, he thought he could run this thing; and turn it over to a massive success.
His latest money (valuation) came from his Twitter pumping/dumping shitposting. That's why he wanted to have Twitter and that's what he is doing with Twitter right now. He is obviously burning Twitter to the ground and with it Tesla, which has a 800bn valuation as of today...
I just hope Space X survives all this madness.