Public money saved him.
Aerospace, especially space, is tightly linked with government spending, period.
Also, does the fact that Musk bet his entire fortune means he's a freeloader on corporate welfare?
A few large companies and governments were his obvious targets. Just like large defense contractors exist on "public" money.
Exactly. The military-industrial complex lives mostly on public money.
That's what I said. Is there some other point that you're trying to make? Getting a government contract isn't taking donations. You deliver a service or a product and you get paid for it. The US government spends a lot of money. Cray Supercomputer sold systems to the government too, for example. I imagine that if Elon wants to build his electric jet someday, one of his best business planes would be to build electric jet drones for the US government.
Sorry if you don't agree with the decision but at this point we're just debating politics.
Without an opportunity and potential like SpaceX, all the public money would have are cases like Solyndra.
The reality was, NASA needed SpaceX as much as SpaceX needed NASA.