It's a joke to think trump cares about taking care of his own after all the evidence to the contrary. He throws everyone under the bus the first chance the gets.
> When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he'd be worthless and tell me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, "drop to your knees and beg," and he would have done it,"
That’s not the point. My point was primarily that there is a need for competition to Tesla.
It’d be not a good place to end up being hostage to Musk (or Trump) whims and depend on them to keep lights on for Starlink or ability to put satellites into an orbit.
And having a clear separation of government is also important.
It should be possible to outcompete X now. The opportunity is there, a lot of people who work there would prefer to avoid supporting Trump. And while X outcompeted NASA (for a motivated Silicon Valley company it’s not that difficult to outcompete a government agency, while draining best people from it), now X itself is becoming a perverted place. So there should be some opportunity there.
Trump is pro big oil, not electric, so Tesla wouldn't be getting any more favors/subsidies under Trump, and with all the NASA money currently flowing to SpaceX, no strings attached, I doubt they would benefit from Trump either. Money coming from Trump will always be conditional on him getting something back.
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but I’m sure there are significant strings attached to the money from NASA. Like, successfully launching lots of things into space for them. And developing a new human-rated space capsule, giving the US and NASA that capability again after a long time relying on Russia. And developing a totally new rocket system, together with a version that can take NASA back to the moon.
> When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he'd be worthless and tell me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, "drop to your knees and beg," and he would have done it,"
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/its-time-trump-sail-into-su...