It’s their 7th launch and they’re still fighting issues with keeping the fuel where it should be. Elon has successfully created a machine that can kill any number of astronauts in sub-orbit and land to do it all over again. How is anyone not getting this? I’ll never forgive him for taking back intellect on space travel to the 1950’s .
There certainly was a lot of scepticism early on in SpaceX’s history. They had to fight political pressure just to take part in the commercial launch program, and had to take NASA to court and argue (successfully) that they hadn’t followed their own rules when they rejected SpaceX’s bid.
They seem to have gotten over that now. Presumably it’s difficult for anyone to argue they can’t do the job when they launch more rockets than the whole rest of the world combined, and they (eventually) delivered on the commercial crew program while the “safe” (and much better paid) pick, Boeing, seems to be very publicly failing and considering cutting their losses.
As for Soyuz, I’m not sure how much those rockets and capsules actually cost so I can’t perform a direct comparison. It must be cheaper though, because they stole all the business for commercial launches from Roscosmos and left them with a serious budget problem. They charge about $60 million for a basic Falcon 9 launch, and they’re making huge profit at that price. We won’t really see the real cost of the rocket until someone builds something which can compete with them for business, because they’re really the only player worth mentioning in their weight class for anyone who doesn’t have ulterior motives (such as governments who want to support their own launch industry)
What I can say for sure is they never came even close to the launch rate of Falcon 9. I think it took something like 8 years, off the top of my head, for total Falcon 9 launches to exceed the number of Soyuz launches and the number of launches per year is still increasing.