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I get that it's hard to do for top elected officials - they are elected with flaws and all after all, and it's the job of the people to try to guess and judge whether someone, say, has had unknown extramarital affairs or holds bad debt, that could lead to them being compromised.
Not saying Musk would insta-fail his security clearance process but he sure wouldn't have a good time being questioned about what he said in a 4chan post or game chat in 2004, or being asked about every pill he took since 2000.
I knew a guy years ago who was going for a security clearance. And he was really worried about them asking about illegal drug use, and he told them the truth about his extensive past history of it. And then they told him they weren’t worried about it because the fact he’d been honest about it meant there was low risk of him being blackmailed over it, so they gave him his security clearance. (Not the US, Australia, maybe the rules are different here.)
They asked her if he was gay. She said she didn't think so, given he had a wife and kids, but if he were secretly gay she thought as his mother's friend she'd be unlikely to know. Then she challenged them – I thought you allowed gay people in the military nowadays. (This was at the time the US still had "don't ask don't tell", but Australia had got rid of all such rules years prior). And then they explained that they didn't have any problem giving security clearances to openly gay people, but were worried about people stuck in the closet, that their sexuality could be used by adversaries to blackmail them.
I think it's deeper than that. I remember he saying that he is not happy or something like that in a podcast with Lex. Him getting deep into the nasty side of politics and all the hatred has taken a toll on him. Based on his twitter he is too insecure and gets too involved when people are despising him and his gaming saga proves it.
To me it became clear he is actually a moron and there is no deeper plan when the aspirational starship concept wasn't paired with him pointing out the other advantages it has.
For example:
* the estimated useable m³ capacity makes a special variant of a starship the equivalent to the ISS in capacity - now imagine docking 4 of those to a HUB. And that is without reusing the wet-workshop concept of space-lab.
* for the same reason nobody point out that it makes zero sense to use a starship as a landing system and not turn it into an instant moon base. The wet workshop concept applies here as well.
That is just two ways starship could be used as soon as it is orbit capable - Neither would need atmospheric re-entry