I see what you mean, but I wasn't referring to Space X accomplishments but its ambitions.

The "we can probably land rockets and reuse them" is what it delivered so far, the claimed ambitions (laughable or not) are about making humanity interplanetary.

The number of steps between "I wrote a quirky database" and "I built a Dyson sphere" are substantially more numerous than there are between "I got reusable rocketry working cost-effectively" and "I used those rockets to put people on Mars".

While I agree with you on the guesstimate, surely you can't exactly know the number of steps in question.

Ambitions are free. Capability is expensive. Achievements are valuable. Ambitions do not predict achievement.

>just because "reusable rockets" got laughed at by the existing space industry …

Were they laughed at? After all, the Space Shuttle was around for decades. It turned out that reusable rockets were not cost effective nor particularly safe. Space X has yet to show reusability is viable.

> Space X has yet to show reusability is viable.

This is a bizarre assertion. It's clearly viable; no other American launcher can currently carry crew, they gobbled up 60% of the global commercial launch market by 2017, and they're undercutting everyone on price very successfully.

I'd say what this all proves is that a free market and private sector is much better at those things than a communist'y government-run project.