But lets pretend that doesn't matter. Musk makes a solid ~1.1 billion a year off of various investments, and has ~11.7 billion in assets. Even if he dumped all that in SpaceX, you'd sill be ~6billion short of NASA's budget. Implying those assests could be quickly liquidated.
Even if we assume SpaceX has more/better talent then NASA. Your still working with at least an order of magnitude lower budget. Which is massive, especially when we are talking about the difference between $1bil/yr and $10 billion/yr
NASA does a lot of things, only some of which are related to any journey to Mars. Of course, they might suddenly drop everything and work towards sending humans.
As an example of a lot of things, New Horizons is coming out of hibernation this Saturday. It sends a periodic "ok" beacon every couple weeks or whatever since launch in the 00s, but its booting up for real this Saturday.
The estimate in 1996 was ~30 billion for a trip to Mars. SpaceX has been accumulating the needed rocket technologies.
Roughly, the tech needed is:
1. heavy-lift
2. Mars EDL
3. artificial g for the trip and return
4. in-situ fuel production
5. methane rockets
SpaceX has been developing heavy-lift at a profit, so that takes care of #1. They are also working on #5, although I'm not sure off-hand who their customers are. (Methane has volume advantages over LH/LOX that might make it better for smaller missions.)
There are still some other pieces of the pie that need assembled. Rockets are surely a part of #2, but Musk is essentially building a company that will sell him a trip to Mars.
The advantage of methane is that it can be produced natively out of the martian atmosphere. Heat + Metal Catalyst + C02 + H2 = Methane + O2
Also hydrogen + O2 = water. So basically you ship the astronauts with nothing but hydrogen and live off the land. Or this is what the Mars Society was calling for.
89% (by mass) of hydrogen/oxygen fuel can also be produced from Martian atmosphere, since Oxygen has an atomic mass 16 times that of hydrogen. I think Methane has advantages other than a slightly larger portion producible from Martian air.
But lets pretend that doesn't matter. Musk makes a solid ~1.1 billion a year off of various investments, and has ~11.7 billion in assets. Even if he dumped all that in SpaceX, you'd sill be ~6billion short of NASA's budget. Implying those assests could be quickly liquidated.
Even if we assume SpaceX has more/better talent then NASA. Your still working with at least an order of magnitude lower budget. Which is massive, especially when we are talking about the difference between $1bil/yr and $10 billion/yr