Innovation serves as a means to an end, like for example mRNA vaccines solved a big problem like COVID.

SpaceX doesn't solve any problem, 90% of the global population lives in urban areas, they connect to the internet using cell towers propagating 3/4/5G and good old fiber or fiber+copper

The remaining 10% is too poor so they cannot afford it, and they are also unskilled so if they want a shot a decent life they'd have to move to cities too where they can start as manual laborers and slowly climb the social ladder, they'd have to do it either independently or thanks to help from NGOs, UNICEF, UN, Doctors without borders etc. To put it bluntly fast internet is the last of their necessities.

SpaceX is textbook SV self dealing and wealth isolation where a bunch of assholes (led by the Chief Asshole of SV) who want to play with rockets and get paid for it , so they try to retroactively find a pitch to sell to VCs and asset managers to finance their play time and they do so by pitching them stuff like:

"Internet on your 10M sailboat" or

"Internet on your 2M Luxury RV"

And of course they get billions because VCs are also loaded and so they painted themselves so much in the corner with their wealth that the only thing that makes them enthusiastic is thin marginal improvement to trophy assets like a 10M sailboat or a 2M luxury RV, stuff that is totally uncorrelated with what regular consumers want or what the economy at large needs.

Likewise there's an early DARPA project for basically any technology you care to name. That says a lot about US budgetary politics and not much about the tech itself. Spend a few hundred million on most research and development and it's a big-government boondoggle; make it a national security appropriation and no one in Congress will bat an eye.

Those young engineers have worked really hard and done some extremely impressive things. Perfectly possible to acknowledge that, whatever you think of the majority shareholder.