No, Elon Musk was never competent at any aspect of spaceflight, or electric vehicle design, or evactuated tunnel trains, or human-machine neural interfaces, or ‘AI’ learning models, or any other field of technical innovation. What he is good at is being a hype man to can bring in investors and stoke his legions of devoted followers. Whenever Elon opens his mouth and mumbles through some description of a technical aspect of ‘Starship’, or starts promising to put a million people on Mars, or babbles out pure bullshit on neurophysiology, it is obvious nonsense to anyone actually knowledgable in the pertinent field, and when he actually gets control of a real project you get…the Cybertruck.
You should think of SpaceX as a company where some competent, driven people with adult supervision and a large development budget made a single-minded effort to take mostly conventional technologies and stitch them together into a higher tempo space launch service that wasn’t several agglomerations of contractors forced together into a joint venture by the government which assured them a certain profit margin whether they innovated the capability for faster and cheaper capability or not, e.g. the United Launch Alliance. And for what it is worth, there is no indication that SpaceX is actually making a profit on the launches; they’ve never opened their books to either the public or the government, they’ve done continuous rounds of capital investment, and it really appears that the future of SpaceX really hinges on the Starlink constellation that is what required the high launch tempo and reusability (so as not to be hobbled by the number of first stages that could be serially produced by the Hawthorne factory).
SpaceX is not going to be sending people to Mars by the thousands because there are no actual provisions for how they would sustain a crew for 8-9 months in freefall nor how they would ship, land, assemble, maintain, and provision some kind of habitat if they did except for cartoons and crude animations with many obvious flaws, notwithstanding all of the physiological and hygiene problems with habitation in space and the low gravity field of Mars. It isn’t even clear that they’ve figured out how to perform the large scale fluid propellant transfers in Earth orbit required for their lunar lander because that is actually a really difficult problem that is not amenable to just improvisation and working it out on the fly.
For all that I’d really like to see permanent habitation in space (and have worked on proposals and developed my own concepts for solar-orbiting habitats mostly using minimally processed in space material resources, but realistically the costs, technical and material limitations, and the potentially unsolvable problems of long term human habitation in space without transhumanist-style genetic engineering make it a pretty ridiculous pursuit at this point, while the wealth of knowledge we have obtained from uncrewed probes and orbiting observatories at a fraction of the cost of a single crewed mission speaks to where our fiscally-responsible priorities should lay. Human space travel beyond Earth’s sphere of influence is great for the imaginative mind but implausible and exorbitantly expensive in practice, and even human outputs on the Moon make little sense once you consider the costs versus the questionable benefits.
Stranger