Pluto flyby mid next july...
Roughly, the tech needed is:
1. heavy-lift
2. Mars EDL
3. artificial g for the trip and return
4. in-situ fuel production
5. methane rockets
SpaceX has been developing heavy-lift at a profit, so that takes care of #1. They are also working on #5, although I'm not sure off-hand who their customers are. (Methane has volume advantages over LH/LOX that might make it better for smaller missions.)
There are still some other pieces of the pie that need assembled. Rockets are surely a part of #2, but Musk is essentially building a company that will sell him a trip to Mars.
Also hydrogen + O2 = water. So basically you ship the astronauts with nothing but hydrogen and live off the land. Or this is what the Mars Society was calling for.
I was just trying to figure out how SpaceX could fund its development of methane rockets before that, through domestic use of methane rockets.
But lets pretend that doesn't matter. Musk makes a solid ~1.1 billion a year off of various investments, and has ~11.7 billion in assets. Even if he dumped all that in SpaceX, you'd sill be ~6billion short of NASA's budget. Implying those assests could be quickly liquidated.
Even if we assume SpaceX has more/better talent then NASA. Your still working with at least an order of magnitude lower budget. Which is massive, especially when we are talking about the difference between $1bil/yr and $10 billion/yr