People seem to forget that the joke at the time was "How do you become a millionaire quickly? Be a billionaire founding an aerospace company". You weren't going

People seem to forget that the joke at the time was "How do you become a millionaire quickly? Be a billionaire founding an aerospace company". You weren't going to get much investor funding for a space company and there were no processes in place at NASA to fairly handle integrating newcomers into the market. Musk betting his fortune on SpaceX and sticking it through even when they were close to bankruptcy was what ultimately blew the doors open for all the other new space companies and the increasing private investment in space technologies.