I find this, and SpaceX, so inspiring. It's easy to feel that technology just moves itself forward. After all there are billions of people on Earth with people working on a countless array of different problems. And each day things seem to move forward, almost inexorably so. And so it's easy to feel that the value of the individual is really relatively low.
Yet imagine a world where Elon did not exist and thus SpaceX did not. Much of what he's done is stuff that we could have been working on decades ago. For some time we were. NASA as early as the 70s had already laid out plans for a Mars expedition including a tremendous space ship that would be assembled and fueled in orbit to take 5 man crew on a 600 day manned expedition to Mars, including landing of rovers similar to the moon.
Those plans got canned by Nixon, and space never really recovered. Not only did we not "inexorably advance" in space, we regressed. Today we're struggling to do a manned flyby of the Moon - when we went to having barely put a man in orbit in 1962, to putting a man on the moon in 1969. The point of this is that technology does not advance by itself, let alone inexorably so. I think it's extremely likely that had SpaceX not come to exist, it's entirely possible that we would still be effectively where we were at near the turn of the century.
Progress of our species, in spite of there being billions of us, is still dependent upon the individual. And SpaceX's plans have very much followed the old quote of Gandhi, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." But of course we've not yet won. As remarkable as this achievement is, it's but the starting line for where we need to be. And that line will not move forward unless we move it forward. But "we" does not mean waiting for somebody else to do so. As SpaceX and Musk have demonstrated, it's ultimately up to the individual to get up and move that line forward -- for the betterment of all.