"$38 billion!", the Post shouts about in the headline, knowing full well that people will take away that every cent was a true, untrammeled, unconditional "subsidy", as opposed to government contracts that came after successfully meeting that early ambitious goal the NASA development contract laid out for SpaceX.
By that logic, every US university with federal funding is being subsidized à la Musk. Every small business that gets an SBA loan—the type of low-interest loan that the Post article highlights—is being subsidized. The NASA program that helped fund Falcon 1 were available to anyone with a promising design, and was contingent on meeting various milestones; to paraphrase the old saying about the early manned space program, no Buck Rogers, no bucks. SpaceX delivered the Buck Rogers.
Regarding Crew Dragon, SpaceX and Boeing each signed contracts as part of the Commercial Crew program for six operational manned missions. After SpaceX fulfilled its six, NASA awarded another contract for eight more (and just purchased a few more). Meanwhile, in addition to Boeing being paid substantially much for its half of the program, the company received a $300 million special, uncontracted payment in 2016 (not disclosed until 2019) to further accelerate development.
The Starliner flight that spectacularly ran into difficulties at ISS in 2024 was a pre-operational manned test mission (SpaceX's equivalent was done in May 2020). In other words, Boeing has not yet begun its six operational missions!
Getting back to the Post article:
>Government contracts to SpaceX from NASA and the Defense Department make up the majority of funds.
Again, this isn't the US government giving sacks full of cash to Musk just because it feels like it. Biden's NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>.
On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload, Europa Clipper <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/a-year-from-launch-the...>, so who knows how many billions more from other launches.