Didn’t want to pollute the other thread, so I’m replying here. You’ve misinterpreted the events. That was the first flight of the Falcon Heavy. SpaceX offered a free ride to several parties, but no one took the offer–after all, this was the first flight of a very complicated system, and the possibility of failure was high. Even free is not cheap if your payload gets destroyed. So instead they flew a dummy payload to prove the system. This is not a new thing, and many brand-new rockets do the same–it’s just that they usually lift a boring stack of steel plates or the like. SpaceX flew a car instead. The net result was the same and had the side effect of gaining more outside interest.