The modern consumer electric car did not come by throwing darts at a board and hoping for a bullseye. It was planned on scientific principles and took decades of precursor work.
SpaceX was going to fail because they didn't use conventional wisdom building their stuff. They used Electron for their UI (my god! guaranteed product failure! astronauts will hate them!). Their stuff exploded when they tried it out. Classic, should've done what ULA did. ULA are the experts.
"They don't listen". That was always the theme. They don't listen. That's why they win.
Tesla makes a lot of stupid choices and are an example of survivorship bias in many ways. They make opinionated products and Musk has the instinct to play chicken and attract investors to keep the thing alive.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19905701
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20446963 (Boeing is part of ULA)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22095120 (Claims that SpaceX is treated better than Boeing)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22096380 (I've seen more accidents from SpaceX than launches from Boeing)
To be clear, I just searched "site:news.ycombinator.com spacex boeing" and grabbed the first few I could. Took me 5 minutes.
It probably isn't too far to go to find comments about how ULA hasn't had a single explosion or some such thing.
You forget about tons of startup and business that failed spectacularly because they think they know better than those "old fools" (also, they usually comes up with arrogant attitude to change the world for some reason)
Tesla is one of a very very few outlier. I have to give them credit for that.
Edit: To clarify things up. I didn't mean that old way is always better, some people I've work with are just too stubborn with their old-school thinking and led to lack of innovation to the point of annoying. But I'm also sure that there are also good old wisdom in different perspective that younger generation can learn from, and not just discard it completely.