> the market was primed for _someone_ to do it.

Nah, it just doesn't work that way. Things don't happen until someone does them. Doesn't matter how easy the pitch is. Someone has to hit the ball.

In my experience most companies and governments are risk-averse and nobody wants to do anything until the mythical "someone else" does it. In the absence of a market equilibrium "defector" (game theory) it usually takes a government mandate or subsidy, and even that often fails if it results in "malicious compliance" like GM's EV1 debacle. (The EV1 was clearly sabotaged. It was intended to fail and when drivers actually liked it it was pulled, with GM even more or less confiscating and crushing them.)

The truth is that a significant proportion of the classical auto industry hated EVs. Some still do. The car industry is long wedded to the ICE and the good old fashioned "vroom vroom" as being essential to what makes a car a car, and everyone from unions to equipment makers to oil companies and petrostates had no interest in disruption.

There are still holdouts like Toyota that are just now being dragged into EVs and Koch Industries is still bankrolling anti-EV disinformation.

The reusable rockets thing was much worse than EVs. The space industry used to be smaller and was dominated by stolid mega-corporations with backgrounds in defense contracting that had absolutely zero incentive to change anything. The conventional wisdom in engineering was that current space launch tech was as good as it could get to the point that you had people authoring paper studies claiming that reusability actually wouldn't deliver much of a win (stop laughing!).

It took an utter lunatic to be willing to lose hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to disrupt space. As SpaceX worked on reusability they did so against a chorus of classical aerospace people and even NASA people claiming they would either fail or build a system that would be more expensive than disposable rockets.

I heard people continuing to make this claim even after F9 cores had been flown multiple times. They seemed to shut up when the video of those two Falcon Heavy cores landing in unison came out.

I think the Shuttle experience convinced everyone that reusability wasn't economically feasible. The whole industry had a bad case of learned helplessness combined with an addiction to cost plus contracts.

Edit: speaking of EVs:

I have this hypothesis that Elon's sort of kind of flirting with the alt-right and Trumpism was a ploy to ingratiate himself to Trump during the Trump era to possibly stop any attempt by Trump to kill either Tesla or SpaceX on behalf of his oil company and old school defense contractor allies. Elon may have decided that sucking up to Trump was the price of avoiding a backlash until Trump was out of office.

I have also wondered if his Texas move and appeals to "red America" aren't a marketing ploy to sell that demographic on EVs, since obviously the latte sipping liberal crowd are already on board with the EV revolution. Tesla is capped at blue state early adopters if they can't cross over into the mainstream and that means selling the non-techno-nerd and non-progressive part of car culture.

No clue, just speculation. Elon is first and foremost a marketer.