> There are plenty of solid reasons to despise Elon - no need for counterfactuals.

There really aren't that many. He's kinda a dick and briefly supported the president very publicly.

Most of the other reasons are just as fatuous as this.

I would rather things like internet not be provided by entities that are incentivised by profits, controlled by one or a few individuals, none of whom are publicly accountable. I am actually willing to tolerate some inefficiency for the upsides of that tradeoff, but I think lots of governments manage to do utilities competently, too

I'd like to see a pre SpaceX post like this from you. Anything pre 2015 is fine. Because this is nothing new.

What you're essentially arguing for is SpaceX building this for the government and government being the middleman.

More money would be spent. Not less.

I not only haven't mentioned Musk a single time, but have thought this for my entire adult life. Utilities should be public goods. Hell, this isn't even that unpopular an opinion. Not everything boils down to culture war or mindless gossip about particular famous rich people

I'm not talking about Musk, or culture war stuff. The rest is fine.

The government has Starshield. And several other non SpaceX satellite systems. They famously sent four (4) recievers of that sort to Ukraine.

There's this idea out there that SpaceX is somehow stealing from NASA. Paired with the notion/assumption that the government builds its space vehicles. Completely incomprehensible.

Apologies, the prior commenter in the thread mentioned it, and I think the overall claim that someone's being disingenuous is frustrating when the contradiction claimed is hypothetical. My objection here is less to the use of contractors to do things like manufacture the satellites, and more to do with allowing private companies to act the operator of a service that's somewhere between a utility and an emergency service. I think this about companies like comcast too

Unlike Comcast with its regional monopolies, SpaceX has viable competition in every segment.

For Internet, other satcom providers are now cheaper post Starlink.