You are right. There are other companies working on the same problems as Elon Musk. However, what really impresses me about him is that he invested all the cash he made off of PayPal into the companies he's working on now. He could have stopped after PayPal, but he didn't.
He could have stopped before PayPal after he sold Zip2 for over $300 million in 1999. Elon's incredible and the next 50 years will be amazing because of people like him.