Had they received the same grant money as Boeing ($4.2b vs $2.6b), it wouldn't have been such a close call.

I'd also note that they were also late by 3 years or so: this did not produce miracles, it was just much cheaper and better in the end than what Boeing is still trying to do.

He is talking about Falcon 1, not CCDev. There was no close call at CCDev, nor any grant money for Falcon 1.

Thanks for the correction/clarification.

Still, I would be surprised if SpaceX did not greatly benefit from knowledge gained in Falcon 1 development when building their Falcon 9 rocket and then optimizing it for reusability — they started development of Falcon 9 while Falcon 1 was still operating.

This illustrates beautifully how stupid labeling ideas stupid is.

To know that that an idea or approach is fundamentally stupid and unsalvageable requires a grasp of the world that humans may simply not have access to. It seems unthinkably rare to me.