It's the same with the first car you build. The first Tesla Roadster cost tens of millions to make. The second Tesla Roadster cost half that.
If there is a factor 10 whatever uncertainty in this equation - you are essentially just gambling like an Options-Day-Trader on Reddit. I understand that investors see “the hockeystick” unlimited revenue upside and justify everything around that.
But I personally would not want to so business in the most over-regulated, slow-growing and low-margin industry with a “factor 10 investment uncertainty”; that uncertainty btw renders your investment null, void and lost if your plane doesn’t get certified. And you don’t even have certification guidelines.
SpaceX is exactly the WORST example in this context: they just went ahead without all the bureaucratic overhead you find at NASA; they weren’t exactly transporting people at the beginning but cargo... And they had a pretty clear market with fat margins; those margins were fat due to the (unnecessary) overhead other agencies created.
You can’t do that in this case.
Put a bit differently: you can probably guess the magnitude of costs for a car to develop. In this case, I would be more than surprised if the get within a 10x magnitude in the end for their cost estimate and EVER get it certified. Again: there are currently NO guidelines how to certify that...
An example from Airbus and the A400 flagship:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europrop_TP400
“Several technical problems delayed the engine's certification test program and pushed the entire A400M aircraft program into further scheduling adjustments. The engine delays were primarily due to problems with completing the full authority digital engine control (FADEC) software to the satisfaction of the civil authorities. More specifically, Europrop determined in mid-2008 that the engine worked correctly, but the FADEC software still did not meet EASA requirements.[27] Since the A400M was intended for humanitarian missions, the aircraft also needed to have a civil certification. Europrop did not realize that this meant the FADEC also had to show traceability and accessibility, so EASA denied civil certification of the software. Because of this problem, the first A400M test aircraft, which was flight-ready by September 2008, was not permitted to fly. Europrop had to triple the size of its workforce to fix the issue,[28] resulting in a FADEC system consisting of over 275,000 lines of code, which was four times more complex than the FADEC software for the largest civil jet engine.[29] Other problems included numerous plane subsystems providing insufficient logging to the main aircraft computer.[30]”
I'm not saying this is doable but those numbers show nothing.
Pilots essentially work for free... It has become “almost industry standards” that young pilots PAY to fly. If I threw a wild guess at 30k USD salaries for these kind of “pilot jobs” with 1000h of flying per year, that puts labor costs to 30-50 USD/h. Maintenance and gas will by far outweigh that.