If he wasn't sucking at the US Government's teat for funding for SpaceX, tax breaks for Tesla, and evading income taxes then I might admire the guy, but as it is, he's the same corporate grifter in a new set of clothes.
There wasn’t the political will in Congress to make SLS a success because it’s not a voting issue for most of their constituents. This is the fate of any ambitious tech development unless that technology can be used to incinerate half of the world in nuclear-fueled hellfire (moon race), spy on the American people without a warrant, kill brown people in the third world, or be give secondhand to the police to fight the war on drugs.
However, never underestimate Congress's undying political will to give bucketloads of American taxpayer dollars and money the government borrowed to rich people with no accountability.
SpaceX seems to have quite a bit of accountability; I'm a big fan of how Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo projects were run (fixed costs, especially, which is biting Boeing in the ass right now...), and hope NASA uses it as a baseline for future projects.
A successful SLS would have been a failure. It costs far more per launch and is not reusable.
NASA could have built a reusable space launch system better than the shuttle, but they didn't. That's exactly my point about billionaires leading by default. It took a billionaire because nobody else did it.
