Griffin is arguing against himself there in giving all that money-- covering his tail. The important part if you read the contracts is a majority of the money was awarded before SpaceX built any hardware, they just had to present plans and half the money was transferred. Elon never risked his own money as all the costs were covered up front and if they failed they would only lose the other half of the contract.
Elon was very scrappy and cheap in the initial builds because he didn't want to risk his own cash.
So the government wanted the services and was willing to take some risk paying in advance that SpaceX couldn’t deliver? Smart and successful bet in this case, but I guess they tried that with other companies as well and those didn’t deliver?!
Agree, the point is that the story of Elon taking personal financial risk with SpaceX is false.
For Tesla, besides the huge DOE grant, he had SpaceX loan some of the excess government money to Tesla in the first few years to derisk his investment there as well.
If you are following along above, even if SpaceX failed, only the government would have lost money spent. The government contract did not take equity so Elon could liquidate and get all his money back. His cash investment was very little compare to government up front money provided by Griffin.
They had no debt, and plenty of assets funded by the government. Other failed rocket companies liquidated and return value to investors. Elon only had to recover 10% of the spend to be made fully whole.
Search for the word 'excessive' https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/hist...
Griffin is arguing against himself there in giving all that money-- covering his tail. The important part if you read the contracts is a majority of the money was awarded before SpaceX built any hardware, they just had to present plans and half the money was transferred. Elon never risked his own money as all the costs were covered up front and if they failed they would only lose the other half of the contract.
Elon was very scrappy and cheap in the initial builds because he didn't want to risk his own cash.