I'd argue that Musk, using the facade of "Private Market Hero", has made government spending on research in this area palatable enough (again) to make progress. Sure, he's a key personality, but it's not like he's accomplishing these things outside of the context of being heavily funded and guided by the government.
So what? Do none of the achievements of the engineers that drove the US space programme through the last century 'count' because they were government funded? What a bizarre world view.
As it happens none of the re-usability programme (Grasshopper, the drone ships, etc) was actually funded by the government. That came from around a billion dollars of private capital investment. Musk talked about this in a TED talk.
