This is a very one sided interpretation. First of all, its factually wrong. SpaceX would exist without the government. It got started without government money.

This is a very one sided interpretation. First of all, its factually wrong. SpaceX would exist without the government. It got started without government money. It is equally false that SpaceX would not exist without government money. SpaceX might have gone bankrupt without COTS contract, but at that time they had already proven the technology and in some form would have come back in some form. During all of SpaceX existence government flights were never the majority of flights and SpaceX didn't fly for the DoD for a very long time. They had a huge backlog of commercial buissness. > The truly amazing things for me with SpaceX are: Elon Musk is somehow allowed to have a role despite ties to China and a behavioural history that would make anyone else ineligible, and the fact that they are intentionally staying privately-owned in order to keep financials out of the public realm. This points me towards the real reason for your arguments. You dislike Musk and thus if SpaceX is doing well and is private he is both responsible and has a lot of control and he gets credit. What is truly shocking is that some people believe any of this would have happened without Musk, or that it would simply continue at the same rate without him. Great now we have SpaceX, so we can kick away Musk and continue to milk the golden goose. You claim that anybody else would not ineligible is just nonsense, nothing he has done would disqualify any other buissness owner from working for the government. The same goes for his relationship with China. The reality is that SpaceX and their ability to innovate is what saved NASA, all of NASA internal development have been major shit-shows for the last couple of decades and it was SpaceX that made space popular again. Even within NASA the type of contracting they are now doing with SpaceX was very controversial, but once COTS started happening slowly most of NASA was converted to this being a better way to do buissness that has now been adopted for a huge amount of new programs and has foster in the US the most innovative private space industry in the world by far. SpaceX has profited from government money, but the government has profited 10x as much from SpaceX ability to actually get shit done. Non of that would have happened if SpaceX was 'just' part of the government or if it made sense to think think of them like that. They are different organizations with different culture working on different things and sometimes work together.