Starship isn't actually operational. I'll let you look at their plans for it and you can tell me if they involve doing things the goverment would pay for like landing on the moon and building space stations or not.

>redirecting funds away from useful stuff like the James Webb Telescope for publicity stunts

The point is this isn't happening.

Almost everything you're complaining about happened under Biden, who Musk wasn't on good terms with.

SpaceX is the cheapest provider of the services it offers, and the government is a large customer but has been less than half of revenue since before 2024.

If the government wants to build a space station (Vast, Axiom, Voyager) or land something(Firefly, Intuitive Machines) or someone on the moon(SpaceX, Blue Origin) , it will find contractors that can do all or part.

The contractors here are BAE Space & Mission Systems (fka Ball Aerospace), L3Harris, and Teledyne. i.e the "NASA" money always ends up at some corp. And complaining about SpaceX stealing money is ignorance.

It's worth noting that the primary contractor for the ISS is Boeing, but Leidos and KBR are involved.

Musk used to be reddit's darling. People's newfound hate for him seem to cloud their judgment and make them forget what made Musk their darling in the first place.