Companies aren't funded by one person, even his. After their current round, Blue Origin will have raised more than three times as much capital as SpaceX, and SpaceX is obviously far more advanced and has already gone public.
Rivian used ten times more capital to reach their first delivery and twenty times more before their IPO as compared to Tesla.
It looks like it's not Musk's money making his companies successful.
He's good at exploiting naive people's dreams.
Musk had around $180M when he founded SpaceX in 2002, and purchased Tesla in 2004. ChatGPT tells me that more than 55,000 people in the world have more wealth than this. So either people who have money choose not to make such risky investments, or they're incapable of it. Probably both. We're very lucky that someone who is both capable of building companies like this and is willing to go bankrupt doing it exists.
Profound. 1/55k regarding wealth really diminishes the role wealth plays.