The guys who've blown up a billion dollars of tax payer money because rather than carefully design it to work the first time, they slap something together and let it fail to 'iterate'? It sounds like it's same guys working at both companies.
I'm not going to say that the SpaceX approach doesn't have disadvantages or that everyone should use it because I don't believe that, but it works for them, even if you get to see more failures (and I understand that many have a fear of public failure, but not everyone is like that).
Their money comes from the same sources as the other space companies: public and private investment/contracts. If a different company takes twice as long and charges twice as much for the service and SpaceX does it faster while charging less for the same service, then if I was a tax payer, I wouldn't care much about the way they develop and test their rockets.
It's important to not allow our views about Musk to cloud our view about what some of his companies are doing. Cybertruck seems to be a bad product. Falcon 9, Starlink, etc, are good products. It is what it is.
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[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/ula-continues-invest...
Starship/Super Heavy "only" cost 5 billion as a program and also has 1 successful flight (and two Earth-shattering kabooms). So far, they're the economical ones by quite some margin.
It's not like Northrop Grumman and Boeing are known for being parsimonious with their money.
But the engineers and even the managers at SpaceX really have done something very special.
And the engineers at NASA too, for that matter - nailing it on the first go is bloody hard and a great technical feat. It's also extremely expensive, but the spec is the spec.
Of course there's also environmental harm from exploded rockets, and the potential to never find success before running out of money, but as long as they succeed in getting it working perfectly before they've spent as much as it would cost to be confident of it working on the first launch, they'll be happy.
The SpaceX team has a choice, and they choose "fail fast". There's a gradient that SpaceX can sit on for their development, and for a suite of companies owned by Musk, people would like to see less fail fast and often.
Please enlighten us how they are designing the rockets wrongly.
Some US$ 18 billion came from tax payer though.
US government paid SpaceX for services rendered. It's economy 101.
They all receive government contracts/investment/subsidies (or whatever you want to call it). Why is this specific company being singled out?