man why did Elon have to go and do all that dumb stuff when all this other stuff he and his teams have done was so good

Good question. But I have a more fundamental question: apart from ships and airplanes on and over oceans, how is space-based connectivity ever going to be cost competitive with terrestrial wired and wireless access? A space ISP needs about 50 million customers to be sustainable. Terrestrial wireless keeps shrinking that TAM.