Huh? What have SpaceX and Tesla done "for the world"? Provide rich people with electric sports cars?
In addition Tesla is betting big on making better batteries. If they can pull that off then that will end up being their true legacy with the whole car thing becoming a neat historical footnote.
As for SpaceX they'll go down in history as pioneers of commercial space flight and wherever future commercial companies decide to take us, they'll all point back at SpaceX as the company that first showed that it could be done.
I genuinely don't believe we need electric cars though at all. We need less travel and transport and redistribution of facilities and skills. That's a much bigger problem. At the moment, the hub/spoke and centralised model of society has no redundancy and providing ubiquitous cheap transport isn't going to solve that, just make the problem hang on longer by forcing people to remain sitting on their butts on a freeway in a slightly better car rolling into a job they could probably do at home or doesn't need it exist anyway.
Also batteries need to be filled up, recycled, disposed of still. We'll see how that goes shall we...
SpaceX isn't fundamentally changing the model of anything, just packaging the same turd differently. That might be to build capital (customers = capital) but there isn't anything fundamentally different to what they are doing at the 10,000ft level. ESA have had a similar model for a couple of decades.
Of course they are. The whole point of everything they do is to cut down the costs of launching things into space by 2-3 orders of magnitude, which itself is just a step towards their real goal, i.e. Mars. They're pretty straightforward about it.
More than anything I think premature, excessive and/or misguided credit is damaging to engineering and entrepreneurship. It shifts the focus from knowledge and creativity to adoration and exceptionalism. Quite opposite the mindset of Musk himself.
If those "microwave weapons" end up enabling the killing of millions of people (like e.g. nuclear weapons can wipe out the whole earth), then those left will be right to say:
"Hmm, maybe we were better off without microwave technology after all. In fact, just because we can make something, probably doesn't mean that we should make it".
On the other hand, if you don't develop technology, you'll never know if it will be used for good, and you'll never see the advantages if it is. And failing to develop something does nothing to prevent someone else from developing it later. If something is possible, you want to be the one making it possible, not the one cowering in fear while someone else forges on ahead.
Ever wonder why what comes out of Silicon Valley seems to augment the Military surveillance effort?
"The Secret History of Silicon Valley": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo