Spacex's contracts are almost entirely government. The private organizations that launch satellites do so on the back of the government funded launches.

So yeah it's government funded. Like all of Elon musk's businesses it wouldn't exist without heavy government subsidies.

It is slightly less obvious because here in America we like to obfuscate the subsidies so we can pretend the free market is doing everything. It goes back to the Cold war and Ronald Reagan types constantly going on about how governm

> This isn't government funded.

And that's is exactly WHY Startship represents economy, not waste.

When the government attacked the problem of getting crews and cargo into orbit, it developed Space Shuttle, which required a standing army of 35,000 people just to keep it running. It never achieved its reusability and reliability goals. SpaceX came into the picture with Falcon-9, whose reusable first stage cut the cost of getting to orbit by 90%, and achieved 100% reliability. Starship is on the way to reusability of both stages and fast t

Tesla is sitting on 800 million worth of unsold cybertrucks. The current plan is to sell them off to SpaceX and xai.

Think of all the money Zuck is dumping into the "metaverse". I checked it out recently, and I am very skeptical. That seems like multi-Billions tossed down the toilet. It makes me think how people used to say that the Communist system fails because of Government picking winners and losers. Now with Unfettered Capitalism, I fear we are going to lose because a few idiots are directing massive resources toward the toilet.