And we live in a world of millions of millionaires, and thousands of billionaires. For that matter, even China is trying their hardest to replicate SpaceX tech given all the resources of the world's largest economy, and 1.4 billion people (meaning a proportionally larger chunk of intellectual outliers), and defacto authoritarian power to make it all happen. Yet they remain (in terms of rocket technology) behind SpaceX.
The U.S. has a long history of aerospace innovation, from NASA to private contractors, and Musk was able to use this ecosystem. China doesn't have that.
And the US doesn't have a long history of aerospace innovation. In 1962 Kennedy gave his 'to the Moon' speech, 7 years later in 1969 we'd go from having nothing to putting a man on the Moon. From 1969 (well 1972 in particular) to the birth of SpaceX (early 2000s) US space technology not only stagnated but regressed. This is why Boeing (who was a major part of the original space race) can't manage to even begin to replicate what we achieved in the 60s, in 7 years no less!
Incidentally this is also a big part of what motivated Elon to start SpaceX. He was looking at NASA's future plans for human spaceflight and they were basically nonexistent. So he wanted to launch a greenhouse to Mars and stream it growing, to inspire people and hopefully get things moving in the right direction again. NASA wasn't interested in any such things, the Russians wanted too much $$$, and so SpaceX was born.
[1] - https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/04/space-economy-techno...
