Parent might be including PayPal too. Though it's not clear what Musk's involvement in their success was.
By the way, if you or I owned either one of the companies you mentioned it would be considered a great success. Your question itself is putting Musk in a league of his own. I don't care that he's an asshole. If someone asked the three of us to eject into space a car that we built, only he could comply.
I would say that PayPal was a success because of the mafia (which mostly consists of Thiel and Levchin's team by the way). I would argue that Musk actually hampered PayPal in many ways (pushing Windows as the dev environment, as one example, when the rest of the team wanted Linux).
That being said, SpaceX and Tesla are successful, even if they took government subsidies to get started. There are many more companies which took a lot of government money yet managed to return nothing except fat bonuses for their executives. Or the number of large companies which have stopped innovating now (IBM and Intel for instance).
By the way, if you or I owned either one of the companies you mentioned it would be considered a great success. Your question itself is putting Musk in a league of his own. I don't care that he's an asshole. If someone asked the three of us to eject into space a car that we built, only he could comply.