It's just not his paradigm.
He thinks in terms of nations, and the top-hierarchy tools that nations have at their disposal - public agencies like NASA / JAXA / USGS ... university consortia and grant-distributors like the National Science Foundation ... NGOs like the Planetary Society, the Union of Concerned Scientists, etc.
At the risk of an ad hominem - without the safety nets those organizations and academia in general supply, I wonder just how the hell he'd manage to eat.
IMO, charging $50k a pop for poorly executed talks with boorish arguments from authority, as is all too common for him, doesn't qualify him to discuss much.
Certainly not the economics or feasibility of a zero-to-billion dollar company that was started all of 14 years ago and, as is usual, was considered insane, a boondoggle, primed for failure, yadda yadda yadda.
Individual people, and individual businesses ... not on his radar, and he doesn't think they have the ability to achieve what's necessary.
Sounds awfully myopic to me - ignores all those wacky individuals like Edison, Tesla, Ford, Morse...long damned list...
For always putting himself out there as the smartest guy in the room, he's awfully cavalier about ignoring history when ignorance suits his purposes in debate or discussion.
It's curious that he ignores the public-private partnership that Musk is almost certainly after: he reduces the cost of access to space, and builds some early prototype spaceships, and then NASA (and Congre$$) comes in with a plan to use these things, now that their mere existence makes such plans feasible.
There's plenty of ways to get there - hell, maybe by mid-century a few dying billionaires decide they're feeling philanthropic and set up something like the Bill Gates Foundation for space.
Unless Tyson has a Time Traveling Hindsight Machine, he's got no more credence than a well-read layman. Who the hell knows how it'll happen? I doubt Tyson was predicting rockets that could friggin' land.
Perhaps he smarts at how so many people overestimate what SpaceX can do (i.e. people saying that SpaceX is the de-facto American space program, period) and how for most people the achievements of NASA (et al) go under-noticed.
Moronic. Hey, let's disparage, criticize, and publically belittle a proven successful private entrant into space exploration technologies in lieu of entreaties that we rely on government to a fault...
Let's just deliberately ignore the fact that they've criminally underfunded, mishandled, folded, spindled, mutilated, and sometimes bent the space agency we do have.
It's a goddamn wonder they haven't managed to break its back.
He should be dragged back to his alma mater, tarred, feathered, and put in stocks for every put-upon scientist and prescient business owner ignored by investors to jeer at until he learns to go discover his own personal Reading Rainbow in some books on these subjects and loses some of that unearned hubris he's so carefully been farming like video game gold.