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Yes, they essentially did. Project Loon used balloons rather than satellites, but is otherwise surprisingly similar to Starlink, technically.

And as far as I've heard, a lot of Project Loon personnel ended up at SpaceX.

Also, the synergy may be a good part of the reason why Google was a large early investor in SpaceX.

https://x.company/projects/loon/

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Loon balloons were more like floating cell towers. Starlink is a broadband first platform that will also do some cellular sort of eventually (just beginning to roll out now).

Both Starlink and Loon are phased-array based routing setups. Traditional comm satellites are neither of those, they're bent pipes. Cell towers are routed, but not phased array.

Do the implementation details really matter that much?

It's all some sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_platform_station ,

limited by the constraints of available technology and budget for experiments at that time.

And not that pioneering (conceptually at least) either, because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic from 199x...

Or was it because Larry and Elon were good friends?

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