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I'm a dilettante myself (went Applied Math, haven't even been to an AIAA conference in a decade), but it doesn't take a lot of knowledge to be impressed. Manned orbital launches have been accomplished by Russia, major US consortiums (e.g. Mercury was accomplished by like 5 companies working with 3 government agencies), China ... and SpaceX. Their workhorse rocket isn't quite "doing things that previously weren't possible" (unless you count the longest string of launches without a failure in history), but it is doing things that weren't possible economically, and it was created for a tenth the cost that NASA would have taken to develop it, according to reports from NASA. In each of the first three quarters of this year, the "most orbital launches" competition has ended up with SpaceX in 1st place, China in 2nd, and "everybody else in the entire world put together" in 3rd. They're on track to soon have more satellites in orbit than the rest of the world (including China, this time) put together. Their biggest problem right now is that their current R&D project is so ambitious that, despite a vehicle like Starship being a clear necessity for any significant exploitation or human exploration of space, none of their competitors would even attempt anything like it.
About the only thing I wouldn't expect a layman to be at all aware of is just how long the list is of other space industry outsiders trying to do what Musk did and failing. This isn't "oh, he just saw an opportunity and grabbed it"; the "smart" money in the beginning would have been split between "Blue Origin will beat him to the punch and make SpaceX irrelevant" and "the outsiders will all fail, again; yes this actually is rocket science".
Neither has anyone else who isn't a major private investor; they've been keeping details under tight wraps. Best guess seems to be that they're raking in profit on Falcon 9 but can't really expand that market much more, and that they're still losing money on Starlink. The big question is whether Starlink goes into the black as soon as they're done with the build out costs, or when their number of subscribers increases past some point, or not until they have a fully-successful Starship cutting down on constellation maintenance costs. Even if the latter isn't the case, the cost of Starship development is another open question. If there's a bigger downturn and they have to tighten their belts and Starship ends up getting delayed a decade because Musk burned "I need to finance tens of billions of dollars fast" credibility on Twitter of all things I'm going to be grossly disappointed.
The other question is how much of this is Musk's track record. I suspect he'd have failed before Falcon 9 if not for Gwynne Shotwell and Tom Mueller, but what the hell do I know (archive link because apparently when you're shut down that hard you go back and "protect" your tweets).
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