I haven't seen anyone mentioning cargolifter [1] which was a company in Germany which tried to commercialise the development of a cargo airship (incidentally using helium). They had a lot of press coverage at the time and many shareholders were private investors. They did got bankrupt in 2002, largely because development of an aircraft is expensive and long. Maybe someone needs to excite Elon about it to get sufficient funding.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter