what's the hot take on why boeing is doing Starliner? is it nasa's hedge against SpaceX?

Boeing is doing it to milk money off of the federal government.

NASA wanted multiple vendors (but SpaceX had to do the original work to get them to not do single source, which is how the government typically does it)

TBD on who’s running Boeing after the criminal investigations; dead whistleblowers don’t accelerate space ambitions

They like redundancy so they don’t run into a situation where they can’t access the ISS. Of course Boeing has had years of delays so it’s possible that at one point they were the first choice…