The GP said:

> Commercial companies like SpaceX on the other hand, who are spending their own money

That's not an accurate description, regardless of whether SpaceX is saving NASA (and the rest of us) money.

They don’t spend taxpayer money. They get paid with taxpayer money, after they have delivered. Big difference.

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but the difference I see is that SpaceX is spending money they earned from NASA rather than being given money to develop a product.

They have done both. IIRC They received NASA money for development projects like the commercial crew program. But in that case they got less money than their competitors and have already delivered results and are now taking people to the ISS for less recurring cost than the competition will if they ever get there at all. SpaceX has also taken government money for other development projects, as have the competition.

Development is hard, and many projects fail. If that area SpaceX also seems to do better than the competition. This is probably because SpaceX basically takes "development project money" to do things they would like to do anyway, and would do on their own given unlimited funds. They do ignore projects that are not in line with their longer term goals.

IBM once refused to invest in transistor based computer R&D so the government did and gave the results to IBM to profit off of.

Public dollars bootstrapped the rocket program SpaceX was able to bootstrap itself from.

The whole ownership thing is a semantic slight of hand. One planet, one environment; we’re all paying the bill in real terms. If we’d been told all our lives it was prudent for government to do these things rather private profiteers, that’s how it would be.

Thank you for politicizing it correctly for us, though. We’d all be lost without you.