Elon Musk Loves Taxpayer Money: SpaceX Says FCC’s Rejection of $886 Million Subsidy Is ‘Grossly Unfair’

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has claimed that the FCC’s rejection of an $886 million Starlink subsidy is “unreasonable” and “grossly unfair,” and that it leaves millions of Americans stranded on the “wrong side of the digital divide.”

Business Insider reports that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is unhappy with the recent decision by the FCC to reject an $886 million subsidy for the company’s Starlink satellite internet service. SpaceX has been seeking a subsidy from the FCC as part of a $9.2 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).

SpaceX says that the funding will help the company expand its Starlink service to rural homes and businesses in almost 650,000 locations across 35 U.S. states. The FCC rejected the bid on August 10 saying that the company had “failed to demonstrate that the providers could deliver the promised service.”

In a recent regulatory filing, SpaceX’s director of satellite policy, David Goldman, stated that the FCC’s decision to deny the company funding was “flaws as a matter of both law and policy.” Goldman said that the information included in the FCC’s decision as “cherry-picked from somewhere on the internet.” Goldman said that denying the subsidy for Starlink leaves many Americans “stranded indefinitely on the wrong side of the digital divide.”

In August, the FCC said that it didn’t make sense to fund Starlink’s “still-developing technology.” It further stated that it could not afford to subsidize ventures that weren’t delivering the promised speeds. But Goldman alleges that the FCC ignored evidence in SpaceX’s application showing that Starlink could meet the requirements for the RDOF.

Goldman said that the rejection was “erroneous and unreasonable,” as well as “contrary to the evidence” and “grossly unfair.” Starlink currently costs $599 for the user terminal and has more than 3,000 satellites in orbit and serves hundreds of thousands of users across the United States, according to the filing.

Read more at Business Insider here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan