Elon Musk, the nation’s richest man, is heavily subsidized by taxpayers, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times. Musk’s net worth is somewhere about $210 billion. Yet he goes where the government money is.
Los Angeles entrepreneur Elon Musk has built a multibillion-dollar fortune running companies that make electric cars, sell solar panels and launch rockets into space.
And he’s built those companies with the help of billions in government subsidies.
Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups.
“He definitely goes where there is government money,” said Dan Dolev, an analyst at Jefferies Equity Research. “That’s a great strategy, but the government will cut you off one day.”
The figure compiled by The Times comprises a variety of government incentives, including grants, tax breaks, factory construction, discounted loans and environmental credits that Tesla can sell. It also includes tax credits and rebates to buyers of solar panels and electric cars.
A looming question is whether the companies are moving toward self-sufficiency — as Dolev believes — and whether they can slash development costs before the public largesse ends.
Tesla and SolarCity continue to report net losses after a decade in business, but the stocks of both companies have soared on their potential; Musk’s stake in the firms alone is worth about $10 billion. (SpaceX, a private company, does not publicly report financial performance.)
Musk and his companies’ investors enjoy most of the financial upside of the government support, while taxpayers shoulder the cost.
The payoff for the public would come in the form of major pollution reductions, but only if solar panels and electric cars break through as viable mass-market products. For now, both remain niche products for mostly well-heeled customers.
Musk declined repeated requests for an interview through Tesla spokespeople, and officials at all three companies declined to comment.
Thanks to our reader Joel for directing me to this story.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Those huge federal subsidies are unanimously supported by Democratic members of Congress, in particular subsidies for electric cars. Those cars are unaffordable to the vast majority of the population, even with subsidies. I like the idea of an all-electric vehicle fleet, but it’s currently not close to being technologically possible or economically viable. I’m a retired electrical engineer.
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Electric cars will become affordable. There must be a huge increase in charging stations. California has banned the sale of cars powered by fossil fuels as of 2035. They will be affordable.
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Please explain the technology that will make them affordable. The raw materials needed to make electric cars are already in short supply and very expensive. Wanting it to be otherwise does not make it so.
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I would be a lot happier about the public money underpinning initiatives like electric automobiles if there were standardized system requirements such as a required recharge interface. Musk’s recharge stations don’t work for other electric cars. Not good enough.
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All the major auto manufactures are now producing EVs or fuel-cell powered cars and introducing new and improvement versions annually, Tesla is no longer needed. If Tesla vanished today, very little would change.
“Future Electric Cars: All Upcoming EVs 2022-2025”
“There are so many electric cars and SUVs planned for the next few years, it’s becoming difficult to keep track of them all. While some upcoming EVs have already been officially unveiled with promised specs and launch dates, others are still concept cars or in the early stages of development.”
https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/advice/future-electric-cars
37 electric car companies…
“the EV industry has exploded. Between 2020 and 2021, “light-duty plug-in electric vehicles” sales jumped by 85%, hitting more than 600,000, according to U.S. Department of Energy data. That’s in comparison to less than 100,000 sales a decade ago.”
https://builtin.com/transportation-technology/electric-car-companies
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What happens when we all plug in our electric cars at home overnight when generally electric power has been diminished due to normally less usage? The power grids will be screaming and we won’t have a full charge to drive with the next morning. I can hear the pleas for fewer EVs and more hybrids or traditional gas engines. Let’s be sure we can actually meet the needs of the EVs before we jump off the pier and discover there’s insuffucuent electricity to meet those needs.
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Probably less will happen when we plug in our EVs than happens now when we poison the atmosphere with pollutants from gas-fueled cars.
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The degree to which Musk is leaching off the government might give climate deniers yet another round of ammo against what is an ultimate necessity: the introduction of competing sources of energy.
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In a few years elon has saved nasa over 40 billion dollars.
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Reduce, reuse, recycle.
The first and most important part is reduce. Consumerism is the problem. Stop buying unnecessarily. When you buy a new car, do it because you need to do it, not because it’s new and “improved”. When you buy a Tesla, you are buying lithium and other toxic heavy metal extraction, oil based plastics, unsupported foreign labor, petroleum based and oceanic polluting shipping, batteries that store energy created by burning fossil fuels and trees, etc, etc, etc. It takes decades to recoup the environmental costs of a single purchase. It’s better for the planet to keep driving your gas guzzler than to buy a new car out of desire rather than need.
We can backhanded thank Clinton, Gore, Biden, and the rest of the Atari Democrats for subsidizing our monopolistic tech overlords with corporate welfare. Elon Musk should not be a billionaire. He is not okay. His goal is to make money, period.
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$4.9 billion is a gross underestimate of all the public support Musk has benefitted from.
His battery gigiafactory in Nevada will alone result in $1.3 billion in tax breaks over the long term.
And virtually all of Musk’s products are completely dependent on public infrastructure and technology developed at public expense.
The roads that Tesla’s drive on were all supported by tax dollars.
And Tesla’s rockets are all based on technology developed by NASA over half a century. And I’d be that some of his rocket scientists and engineers even worked at NASA at one point.
The billionaires all act like they developed their businesses from scratch in a vacuum but nothing could be further from the truth. Bezos and Zuckerberg s businesses depend on the internet, which was invented and developed with public funding. And Bezos also depends on the roads for Amazon.
If all of that stuff was included, the public support for billionaires would easily be in the hundreds of billions (if not trillions).
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On Shoulders of Giants
The billionaires rest
On shoulders of giants
A public bequest
Despite their deniance
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Make that Space X rockets all depend on technology developed at NASA.
As far as I know Tesla’s don’t use rockets for propulsion.
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Tesla isn’t Lockheed. They have their own engineers and nasa doesn’t baby sit the engineers like they do in cost plus contracts. When they went to the space station they pretty much were hands off on the falcon heavies design.
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The EV market in 2023 is a Tesla market and it will continue to be, so long as its competitors are bound by production capacity. 4 of the top sold ev cars are tesla and they haven’t even realized a ev under 50k yet.
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