Only if the competition is mediocre. If the competition takes away money, attention and admiration from Elon, he will not be happy.
RocketLab has already been doing that, and he still has praised it.
Musk doesn’t have to be your villain to be an imperfect person.
Rocket Lab deserves the praise it receives. More so than Blue Origin, an older company whith grander ambitions but has been unable to execute on anything beyond a few small scale suborbital hops. Their methalox BE-4 engine is admittedly pretty cool though.
vs
2. Design for first-time-close enough, spend a lot of money on many relatively cheap-ish prototypes that get blown up but improve each time. While making money with a less (but still) ambitious design
Anyone motivated by money would have stopped working that hard many, many Billions ago.
I'm sure he's motivated by other stuff too but he's very clearly also motivated by wealth accumulation to some degree.
I would argue that many of the billionaire class (outside of wall street) are more interested in their projects and goals than strictly capital accumulation. Especially those who have signed off on donating a majority of their wealth after their death.