There’s a lot of out of date info in there making your conclusions a bit innacurate. The yen is super weak right now, compared to USD and EUR especially.

Rice grown in California should not be cheaper than rice grown in Japan, just purely based on a currency analysis. Almost all other domestic foods in Japan are much cheaper in real terms than in California.

I want to agree with you, but Elon is not stupid and definitely had something to do with the success of Falcon 9.

What I think he is good at is having crazy innovative ideas and pushing his engineering team to make it some kind of reality. Being able to spend the time to listen to engineering, work through the issues, find ways to do things to make it work while still achieving the fundamental goals.

My guess is that he’s not had the time to do that process and instead became the “do it my way or you’re fired” guy. Less Elon could be bad because they have less chance to talk sense into him. He certainly didn’t give up any control when he gave up his focus.