content: I think an issue you're not considering is capitalism. Capitalism would work incredibly well if companies would agree to just compete against each other and grind their prices down until one simply could not afford to do lower them anymore and the consumer reaped all the benefits. In reality most relevant industries today have major barriers to entry and competition, and instead of grinding each other down the few big players acknowledge they can make a lot more money by colluding than they can by competing. Before SpaceX we still had a completely free market in rocketry, but the natural barriers to entry meant that there were only really a handful of meaningful players including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. And these companies did not really accomplish much of anything. Until recently we were still using soviet era technology to launch rockets - not just technology developed during soviet times but at times literally technology built during the soviet era. What did change is the price of launches. Under this oligopoly prices for launches skyrocketed. The final per-launch cost for the Space Shuttle ended up in excess of $1.5 billion dollars!! That's really just completely out of touch with reality in the same way many costs in our economy are out of touch with reality.  While I think Musk is undoubtedly brilliant, he's also unique in simply playing in capitalism like it was meant to be played but that's clearly since he's guided by something beyond just the accumulation of wealth. Most people that find themselves with the sort of wealth he has only got there because of a steadfast obsession with the accumulation of wealth itself. As opposed to a means to an end, the wealth is the ends in and of itself for them. The same is also true in the electric car market. What Elon did with Tesla is undoubtedly amazing, but these other companies have had decades they could have been working on this. Innovation and competition cost money - whereas complacency and collusion create money.  Basically I don't necessarily think this whole thing is an issue just of this particular market - it's an issue of capitalism in general. If we could find more individuals with the means and desire to achieve greater things than just the accumulation of wealth I think we could see similar revolutions in an absurd number of industries in the US.