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Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

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rapsey·

> we now LICENSE it from oligarchs who bought it with our money to hold over our heads forever.

Oligarchs who went all in and risked their entire net worth to make it work you mean.

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This comment tastes bad: It says that an oligarchy is OK as long as the oligarchs "risked their entire net worth".

Would you say this also applies to other systems? Like dictatorships, etc?

No, they meant what they said, a huge amount of the funding for these ventures comes from the taxpayer.

And they got what they payed for. A great result for all involved.

oligarchs who knew that with their monopolies they could always extract more cash from their market-capture on demand

Take spacex as an example: spacex received $20bn in funding from federal government. That's 10% of the pre-Trump-election net worth of the oligarch owner.

And SpaceX has done exactly what they were asked to do with that money. Great value for the taxpayer.

Indeed. Because they whole deal of them getting that money was to do the job for NASA the way NASA cannot due to public scrutiny.

That’s a fictional accusation

Sure: https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacex/.

SpaceX received very little in 'funding' from the government. However they sold extensive services to the government, primarily by offering the best value on competitive contracts.

Yes, I'm sorry, funding is not the right term. They received $20bn in federal contracts. And they do fantastic work. My point is, the government is certainly aware that spacex does a great job and delivers. It's not a competition between NASA and spacex.

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