You highlight a pattern we see forming which we see repeated in many aspects of where we are at, the final act of capitalism in its dying throes; Musk's approach is typical, it involves knocking down /knee-capping the competition, so he can be at the top of a lesser empire, at the head of a pack which was further behind.
Starship is nothing to what was produced by NASA in the 70s, actual manned flights to the moon and actual reusable shuttle spacecraft, capable of flying into deep space.
Aerospace is not what it was when we also had things like Concorde, which routinely flew commercial passengers at supersonic speeds between Europe and the US at least.
The 5G offered by Starlink is a compromise, gained by knee-capping the development lead by Huawei working with UK CESG amongst others, for nearly twenty years. It could have been so much better if Huawei had been allowed to complete the development, and we would not have all the problems of the sky being littered with thousands of pieces of non-radiation hardened shrapnel, which endangers all pre-existing satellites, as well as manned spaceflights.
Admittedly Tesla did open our eyes to the capabilities of EVs, that truly was innovation, but now it's being sold as the nirvana of clean energy transition, even motivating non-sensical projects like electric battery powered aircraft, which traditional aerospace engineers, at least those not willing to sell their soul for a lie, can see will never fly, compared with ICE engined aircraft, the combined EV industry is attracting ever depleting funds from ever depleting extracted energy, which could instead be used on a non return basis, like government funding always was, to achieve an actual fix via solar powered hydrogen (The only actual fix) for the global energy problem, which always was down to profit at its heart, the energy in profit being what is applied to the thermal mass of the planet, causing the temperature rise, we are locked into a world of Enshittopia believing this is progress, when it's physically impossible to even just survive with nothing changed.
