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AndrewKemendo 5 hours ago

The company was entirely dependent on government funding for its first 17 years

that’s undeniable

Starlink would not exist if the government did not prop up the whole thing in the beginning

This is precisely how the Commons get privatized and your ignorance around this topic is unbelievable

Unreal how simplistic you people are

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kjksf 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

SpaceX had to literally sue the military to even be allowed to bid for projects. And won. And then won the contracts.

The guy who landed on the Moon testified in congress opposing giving SpaceX any money.

The government wanted nothing to do with SpaceX.

SpaceX won the contracts despite the government, not because. They won the contracts because they offered the best product at the lowest price.

	▲	AndrewKemendo 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> SpaceX had to literally sue the military to even be allowed to bid for projects. And won. And then won the contracts. This is literally how government contracts work on massive multibillion dollar systems. Palantir famously did this with the Army: https://www.defensenews.com/land/2019/03/29/palantir-who-suc... Every gov-tech company on the planet has a team of people hired and dedicated to suing the government via a well understood process that is intended to filter out organizations that do not have the financial capacity to deal with the government. As an AF SES I owned $300 million worth of contracts for the Air Force starting in 2020 and by 2022 my acquisition portfolio for AFLMC was $6B yearly. Guess how many of those contracts had actual competition despite months of solicitation? Almost none because the FAR is written/updated by corporations such that the barriers to entry are impossible to meet. Go tell me how quickly you can get a piece of software running on a govt network and come back to me and tell me that there’s equal competition. You have no idea how much corruption is baked into the structure of government contracts. The corruption is not that someone violated the acquisition system; the corruption is that the acquisition system legally converts concentrated contractor influence into unequal access, unequal rule-shaping power, and unequal probability of award.

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marknutter 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The government was a customer that paid for a product/service. Are you saying all entities that sell to the government are being "propped up" by the government?

	▲	AndrewKemendo 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes There are no non-corrupt government contractors if for no other reason then the government contracting market is not a open and free market it is regulated specifically by the federal acquisitions regulation which was in large part written and consistently adjusted by non-elected corporate leaders: https://www.jacksonlewis.com/insights/dod-seeks-contractors-... Read war is a racket and it will be clear: https://archive.org/details/WarIsARacket