Well, he did not say that building cars is harder than building rockets, but that "building the machine that builds the machine" is more difficult.

As in: efficient, large volume manufacturing and supply chain management. But that's obviously a very different kind of challenge.

He said the same thing about the new SpaceX rocket, Starship, which is supposed to be produced in large volumes.

And? Are you saying that Apple couldn't build rockets?

Why would you think Apple is capable of building rockets? They have essentially zero aerospace expertise and that type of engineering is not at all in their DNA. Sure, they have billions of dollars to burn so it's within the realm of possibility, but it would be a very inefficient use of their cash.

Well, Elon Musk didn't have aerospace experience expertise either.

Neither did Jeff Bezos.

Jeff Bezos started 2 years earlier with a much larger war chest, and has yet to send a rocket into orbit, let alone send humans to a space station.

Sure... but SpaceEx is a company with laser engineering focus on essentially one goal for the last two decades, and they're only recently gaining traction on their ambitions, Apple would have an extremely steep curve to ascend before they could even hope to enter the "crash a bunch of rockets for research" phase. Apple just isn't built for this type of engineering.

Elon Musk started 20 years ago. So in 20 years Apple could of course build rockets if they wanted.

Yup. Apple is closer to Ford and GM than it is to Tesla. Tesla is highly vertically integrated, and probably moving more so. Apple is much less vertically integrated. They design their products, but all their manufacturing is like others -- kinda like Ford and GM.