I have a theory they're buying it more for the engineering talent and personnel, than any intention to run a narrow-bandwidth cubesat M2M communications network as a separate thing to starlink.
Swarm is a VHF system (hundreds of MHz) that can't come anywhere near Starlink in terms of bandwidth, but can operate with much lower power and a small, simple, dirt-cheap antenna. The tradeoff is that you'll end up paying way more per byte. But for their intended applications (basically, embedded IoT-type sensors), you don't want to transmit/receive much anyway, and keeping BoM cost down is key.
In other words: there's basically no application where someone might be choosing equally between these two options.
A signal of encouragement, you mean? Like, "invest in this space" -- no pun intended -- "because we'll offer you a great exit"?
I think it's pretty clear SpaceX doesn't have any competitors in the satellite constellation business.
SpaceX will spend something like ten billion dollars to build out the full Starlink constellation using their own launch services, which are vastly cheaper than anything anyone else has.
Potential competitors would have to spend an insane amount of money to launch their constellations, which basically means it will never happen.
Here's hoping someone with investigatory power is reading this.
Interestingly, Swarm had launched some of their microsatellites on SpaceX vehicles.
Interesting work I'm sure.