Elon Musk promises a lot of things, but doesn't have a good track record on delivering.
SpaceX has a fantastic track record of delivering. So I'm not sure what you're talking about. Just look at the dragon capsule and compare that to Boeing's Starliner. They got funding to the exact same thing and they started work around the same time. So far dragon has done 10 cargo missions and 13 crew missions without any major problems. The Starliner has done 1 test mission in which there were major problems (including a parachute that didn't deploy... yikes), and only recently, years later, 1 crew mission.
Is the SLS a failure? I guess not... but it's not worth the 30 billion we have already put into it for a technological step backward. Calling it a success is like calling the Concord a success, that vehicle flew too.
But the idea that spaceX is losing the space race is just laughable. They're clearly dominating the space race. They put the Russian commercial launch program completely out of business (the Russian space program actually named SpaceX as the reason they gave up). These days SpaceX launches more rockets than the rest of the world combined. Through the savings they see with reusability they can undercut all their competition and still make a great profit. The starship promises to do that to a much greater extent. They're on track to be able to produce these for something in the area of 100 million a piece, and then be able to reuse them up to 100 times. This could bring launch costs down immensely. Can you imagine launching 100 tons to orbit for $10 million? Think of all the things that would suddenly be possible.