The vast majority of government research for space launches was done by the Nazis. Everyone has access to that and NASAs research, yet...

SpaceX is currently launching space shuttle sized payloads for a price that is over 40 times less than the shuttle, and less than half the cost of other private competitors, and at a cadence none of them have ever achieved.

Re-use is the key launch technology of the future and its greatest and only commercial application has been done by SpaceX.

I'm generally for private enterprise, and It seems rather questionable to me to say that everyone who takes any Government money under any circumstances is equivalent. Musk has indeed taken a lot of Government money, and more importantly IMHO hired a bunch of people who got their experience in space and rocketry at NASA, but does that make him more or less private than, say, Lockheed-Martin or the other usual contractors?

I would say that the aerospace companies doing cost-plus contracting for loosely defined projects with fuzzy requirements and no prospect for sustainable private operations are in a very different business than companies that do fixed-price contracts with the Government for specific services with an eye towards capturing a private market in the future. The cost-plus guys are IMHO government agencies in all but name, plus some fat paychecks and kickbacks going to a few connected people. The fixed-price guys are IMHO normal private companies that happen to contract with the Government for their normal profitable services sometimes. I don't think it makes much difference if the first business that funded initial development was all government contracts - the private market for launch services is real, and SpaceX has a plan for making a profit in it and is progressing towards capturing a solid market share in it.

You are quite right that the space launch industry and the technology it uses wouldn't exist without government research and funding. That's perfectly true.

But it's also true that without Musk there would currently be no prospect of significant rocket component reuse for another generation. Rocket launch costs would be double or triple what they currently are. It also seems very likely now that within my lifetime we will see launch costs to orbit close to 100th what they were just a few years ago. Some of us think that's a good thing.

A graph of the improvement in rocket technology from 1945 to now would look like a hockey stick early on, levelling off more or less flat for the last 40 years. Musk has bent that curve back up into a hockey stick shape again.

Not really. In the 60s we basically verified that certain rocket and engine designs work and that we could go beyond earth orbit. Creating a reliable, long lasting and reusable space rocket/vehicle is, in my opinion, orders of magnitude more difficult. Just look at the Space Shuttle failure as an example of trying to do space on the cheap. Also, remember it took about 5% of the US GDP in the 60s to put men on the moon. I believe in Musk but trying to make space cheap is just simply a difficult problem and one I wished we funded more.

Regardless, designing a modern reusable launch platform isn't anywhere close to trivial.