Saturn V was that expensive because the sheer volume of calculations that had to be done were done BY HUMAN BEINGS. Electronic computers weren’t up to the task. Salaries were a huge expense item because computers (in the original sense of the word) liked to be paid.

SpaceX has the advantage of having computers literally four orders of magnitude more powerful in every one of their engineer’s pockets. Plus computers far more powerful than those available at a very low price. Calculations that took thousands of person-days (daily!), with the commensurate salaries of the people doing them, are now done in seconds.

There is simply no excuse—beyond the toxic “move fast and break things” ethos of modern “tech”—for constantly having rockets blow up in this day and age. The simulations and static test analyses and such that were once such an expensive chore are orders (note the plural) of magnitude cheaper today than they were in the 1960s.

It’s just incompetence and arrogance.

Also I note with interest that from inception (1962) to first full stack flight (which was also the first flight of any component) was only five years.

Starship was officially announced in 2012 and its first flight (of sorts, if you call "spinning out of control until it disassembled itself a “flight”) was in 2023.

ELEVEN FUCKING YEARS and SpaceX still hadn’t made a surviving launch. For reference, eleven years after the Saturn V was started, the Saturn V had made 13 flights, all successful, doing its final flight that year boosting Skylab into LEO. (You know, that place that SpaceX hasn’t even yet put an empty Starship into.)