Bullshit; there are companies he's been involved in that have turned a profit.
Zip2 made a good profit and a great exit - http://news.cnet.com/Compaq+buys+Zip2/2100-1023_3-221675.htm...
X.com / Paypal generates first profits in 2002 - http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y02/m04/i18/s02
SpaceX is profitable - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-04/spacex-pro...
Don't forget SolarCity is turning itself around and will likely turn a profit in a few years (http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/02/17/what-to-loo...). The same for Tesla which is expecting to turn a profit in 2020 (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tesla-wont-turn-profitable-...).
It doesn't preclude it, either.
Pretty much every business larger than one or two person operations uses Other People's Money to grow to profitability. See Facebook, etc.
Use of OPM doesn't guarantee success, but for industries that have large capital entry and operating costs, it's necessary.
Musk is working in fields that manipulate matter, not just bits - so it will take longer to see if Tesla and SpaceX reach profitability ("success") than it would for a generic software startup.
Be patient. You may not know whether a company or a child is successful for a couple of decades, at least.
* gigafactory under construction
* freemont factory producing ~50K vehicles/year
* spacex successfully, repeatedly delivering payloads to orbit (and successfully demonstrating their crew escape vehicle recently)