The backlash against Musk for being the richest person on Earth is just a warmup, the backlash when he's a trillionaire because of SpaceX is going to crazy
It feels like people think wealth is a game, and they don't think Musk "deserves" to have the "high score" because he's not "nice enough". And so you get a backlash where they think he should have most of it taxed away (to make the results of the game "fair"). Or they try to belittle what he's accomplished by saying he doesn't actually do anything or inherited most of it to diminish it somehow.
But they don't understand what real wealth is. It's not having a big number on paper. It's being able to do things, to have resources that can be put towards achieving your goals. Having billions of dollars is fine if you want to buy a big boat or a couple mansions or an island. But Musk's goal is to colonize Mars, and he's actually on the path towards achieving that, which represents a kind of wealth we've never seen before. And all these people complaining about his Tesla stock and taxes and tweets have completely missed it.
Musk owns over 50% of SpaceX outright, and over 70% of the voting shares. It's his company, he decides what they do or don't do. He gets most of the profit if he decides the company should make a profit, or he can decide to run the company in to the ground by using up all their assets on Earth to colonize Mars.
To get an idea of what SpaceX is worth right now, try to answer the question of how much it would cost to buy all of Musk's ownership in it? How much would you have to pay Musk to take his company away from him? And really, SpaceX is the only realistic means for Musk to make any meaningful progress towards his primary goal of making life multiplanetary. You could give him hundreds of billions more in cash, and it wouldn't help him if it meant giving up SpaceX. Let's go crazy, would Musk take a trillion dollars to give up SpaceX? Arguably not, for the way he spends his money, it wouldn't actually do him any good. I suspect there's no person or even company on Earth that could afford to buy SpaceX from Musk because there's nothing else that couple replace it. I bet China would happily pay a couple trillion dollars for it, if the US would allow Musk to sell it to a foreign government.
That brings up the real issue. If Starship is even moderately successful at hitting most of its goals, it'll redefine humanity's ability to access space. And it will be owned and controlled overwhelmingly by one person. It would be like if one person owned every railway on Earth in the 1800s, or all the ships in the 1400s. It's a level of "wealth" that doesn't even make sense to measure in dollars anymore. It's something you can't tax, and it's something that the US government might feel is too important to be privately owned and controlled. the ability to control access to space for most people, or to be able to travel around the world in under an hour, or the ability to build a second completely redundant internet in space that's outside the control of terrestrial governments, or the ability to *colonize another planet*?!?
We have politicians like Bernie and Warren complaining about Musk "not paying his fair share" because he's only paying a few billion in taxes while his wealth has gone up much more. Or we have trolls on twitter and reddit complaining about his tweets and calling him immature. They compare Blue Origin's little hops to the Falcon 9 and call them both "billionaire joy rides". And they all completely miss the point. They're distracted by some numbers of paper, that basically don't matter at all. Musk could give all of this Tesla stock away and still be arguably the wealthiest person on Earth by a wide margin, by the only metric that actually matter. It's just that no one's bothered to actually try and measure it in any meaningful way.
When Starship starts to fly and Starlink really takes off, when most of the satellites orbiting Earth are owned by one person, when one person can decide to make his own moon base if he wants, people are going to *freak out*. The backlash against Musk and SpaceX when people start to realize what he's accomplished, and the way the world has changed for everyone because of what he's done, is going to dwarf anything we're seeing now.