He started both Tesla and SpaceX when he had "only" a few hundred million to his name and no more connections than would be expected of a Silicon Valley guy making payment software. And lots of brilliant guys, including John Carmack for instance, have tried their hand at aerospace - and failed. Jeff Bezos started Blue Origin
before SpaceX was even founded, and it was literally only last month that they finally managed to get a rocket into orbit for the first time. There's a joke in the industry: 'How do you become a millionaire in the aerospace industry? Start out as a billionaire in the aerospace industry!'
And we live in a world of millions of millionaires, and thousands of billionaires. For that matter, even China is trying their hardest to replicate SpaceX tech given all the resources of the world's largest economy, and 1.4 billion people (meaning a proportionally larger chunk of intellectual outliers), and defacto authoritarian power to make it all happen. Yet they remain (in terms of rocket technology) behind SpaceX.
