Basically they pulled a fast one on Musk, who believed that with his giant (300$ million give or take) donation would be able to get his preferred candidate to NASA.

The fact that he was quite competent and generally liked doesn’t matter to Trump, who seems set on defunding NASA and having someone there who won’t complain.

Nah thats bait and the simple answer. Nothing to do with musk it was all known before the relations. Space was not ready for Jared and it denied him. Wonder why? Well if you do a little digging you will see he has some really bad news about him. Like no person on Earth would want to work with him when they listen to what comes out of his mouth. I wonder if there are recordings of him there sure is a book of his actions.

Rules for thee, not for me.

Elon too, until 2022.

NASA making their own rockets/spacecraft certainly wouldn't make the government leaner. NASA was always using contractors, but usually NASA was taking a bigger part in the development/operation of rockets/spacecraft. For human spaceflight, that changed with the Commercial Crew Program, with the contracts for the development of the crewed spacecraft that would be designed, produced and operated entirely by commercial companies. SpaceX received $2.6 billion for the development of Dragon, Boeing received $4.2 billion for Starliner. So SpaceX was the cheaper option, and they started operational crewed missions to ISS in 2020. Boeing got much more money, and in 2025 they still don't have an operational spacecraft.

Commercial Crew Program (and also commercial resupply flights to the ISS) started during Obama presidency, so we can thank Obama for commercializing space and making NASA leaner and saving taxpayer dollars.