Why Did Elon Musk Start SpaceX?

David Senra, reading Elon Musk, says Musk chose space because the problem was important to fix, and the likeliest outcome was losing all his money.

He does not look at ideas and ask for a rank order list of the best business opportunities from a financial standpoint. Company stock value is not a metric by which he judges his own achievements. He was not trying to figure out the rank ordered best way to invest his money. The premise was not that space has the highest return on investment. He did not think he could do real estate or invest in shoemaking. The alternative was no progress in space exploration, so the work had to get a shot or we stay stuck on Earth forever.

SpaceX is now one of the most valuable private companies on the planet. He started it 24 years ago, when he was 30. Everybody made fun of him and kept calling him an internet guy playing with expensive toys, a software guy. The more he learned, the more he read, and the more he talked to people, the more convinced he became that a massive opportunity was there.