Yes, I think 2008 was a very hard year for Elon. The issue with Tesla was that something like 200 Roadsters were manufactured incorrectly and all had to be fixed at immense cost and time delay. He was also going through a divorce at the time. And all SpaceX launches had exploded off the Pacific island that they were forced to use since their competitors successfully lobbied for it to be illegal for SpaceX to launch from the USA. Rough year.
ULA lobbied to ban them from a launch site (at Vandenberg) that was nearby their own, which had a very expensive rocket and very, very expensive payload on it, claiming that a SpaceX rocket launch would be too dangerous. Forced them to launch from Kwajalein Atoll, which made things much harder. Probably contributed to at least one failure, thanks to the corrosive, salty atmosphere.
Edit: Not unfair to assume that it was motivated by anti-competitive interests before any real concern about possible effects on their pad.
Which is something which differentiates Elon from a lot of people, the ability to execute (and by that I mean get the job done), while under insane amounts of stress, that is a very rare quality.
> Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.