His beliefs are irrelevant. Appealing to them shows you are using rhetorical technique rather than logic. You are attacking his character by implying stupidity

His beliefs are irrelevant. Appealing to them shows you are using rhetorical technique rather than logic. You are attacking his character by implying stupidity for his beliefs rather than attacking the core of his ideas. You follow up the rhetoric with a straw man: you imply that someone must be the very best to lead in order to lead rather than merely qualified to do so. This isn't a fair position and it definitely wasn't the position expressed by the person you quoted. You then try to make the case that because these companies have gotten money from the government that it discredits their successes as if another reality they might have failed. This isn't reasonable as an argument structure. In another reality, English might be spelled differently. That doesn't mean that you don't know how to spell. The argument structure is deeply unsound. Next you demand certainty, but you restrict the range to just Tesla and SpaceX. If you were genuine in demanding certainty, you would have to expand the range to include PayPal and Zip2, since in those cases we can say things with certainty because his involvement is over and so judgements can be made. You do this, because you have to, because if you didn't that means you would have to accept plausible reasoning. Yet the measurements which incorporate plausible reasoning, such as the stock price, refute you to an extreme extent. By stating all this with appeals like "do you really believe" and "this is such a tiring rebuttal" you trick yourself by employing rhetoric. It makes you seem to yourself as if your argument is much stronger than it actually is. After all, you are obviously right that he doesn't actually think what you implied he thought. So when you ask that question to him you already know that the answer is no he didn't think that. Unfortunately, there is a reason as far back in Western thought as Plato rhetoric was being described as the art of being convincing without being right. Beating up the straw man makes you think like your argument is correct so much so that you grow tired of it.