| ▲ | Tuna-Fish 5 hours ago | |
Musk has benefited enormously from public contracts and policy, but all the questionable ones are in Tesla (and especially originally solarcity, but that got folded into Tesla). The government contracts that made SpaceX were all open bid, where SpaceX bid an better solution than anything that any of the established companies did, at literally half the price. Falcon 9 was a massive gift to the US government, in that it drove the entire industry to halve the prices they extracted from the government. Dragon was just as good. That they also built a profitable launch company out of it just highlights how much of an outlier SpaceX is. They sold the US government a dollar for fifty cents, made a profit doing it, and ended up driving half the rockets already flying out of the business. | ||