Actually it s not The key description as privately funded is pretty accurate in that the first hundred million bucks of development and the creation of the company was all Elon Musk and another hundred million was from SpaceX VC investors In addition to the c 200 million private funding some specific development were paid by NASA for specific cargo vehicle characteristics that NASA wanted for cargo vehicles to take cargo to the ISS and later about 75 million to date for specific development of crew carrying capabilities that NASA wanted SpaceX to develop Most of the other paid to SpaceX by NASA are merely the payments to date for buying two launches of a medium class launch vehicle these typically cost 100 million per launch although SpaceX prices to NASA are I believe quite a bit lower per pound of payload than the United Launch Alliance sells launches of its flagship launch vehicles the Atlas V and the Delta IV or for partial payments for future cargo launches 12 of them under contract where due to US accounting rules on long lead time capital intensive products it has been usual for years in even the commercial satellite launch industry to pay substantial progress payments to the manufacturer beginning two years prior to the nominal launch date So SpaceX may have some hundred millions of NASA money but by far most of it is merely payments for specific launch services either already flown or with launch vehicles in production and a much smaller part of it is government paid costs for SpaceX to develop specific product characteristics that the government wanted So you can t really count the purchase of specific SpaceX launches by NASA as government funding of the development of SpaceX s launch vehicles the Falcon 1 and the Falcon 9 This is all documented in a great many sources Hope this is helpful to you Cheers