Musk Hails Recession, Hits Federal Subsidies Like The $465M He Got In 2009

Global recession is a good thing, Elon Musk said in response to a question from a Twitter user.

Photo Insert: At a price of a$80,000, the Tesla Roadster wasn’t exactly priced to move; 2,450 global sales made Musk’s vision of mass-producing electric cars look like a pipe dream.

“It has been raining money on fools for too long. Some bankruptcies need to happen. Also, all the COVID stay-at-home stuff has tricked people into thinking that you don’t actually need to work hard. Rude awakening inbound!” he argued.

Rebutting the arrogant stuff Musk dished out, Andrew Lawrence wrote for The Guardian that “his tweets do not talk about the considerable handouts Musk himself took after plunking down $6.5 million for a majority stake in Tesla in 2004. How did Musk weather the economic storms and rude awakenings thereafter?”

In 2008, Tesla rolled out its only product – a Lotus Elise knockoff called the Roadster. At a price of a$80,000, the coupe wasn’t exactly priced to move; 2,450 global sales made Musk’s vision of mass-producing electric cars look like a pipe dream.

But a year later, Tesla received a $465 million loan as part of a federal stimulus package – money that paid for the development and manufacture of Model S. Tesla did not pioneer electric cars; Nissan did.

Musk moves those cars with help from considerable tax breaks for electric vehicles and resells his carbon credits to high-carbon emitting rivals pressureD to clean up – at least $517 million since 2015.

There’s a reason why Bill Ackerman and other short-sellers bet big on Tesla to fail. The company would probably be as dead as Nikola Tesla himself if it hadn’t been for the government “raining money on fools.”

Musk claimed a recession would be good because “companies that are inherently negative cash flow (i.e., value destroyers) need to die so that they stop consuming resources.”

From 2010 to 2018, Tesla raised $20 billion in capital while producing a negative cash flow of $9 billion. On record, 2021 was the company’s first full year of profitability.

Since last August 2022, Tesla has received roughly $64 million in incentives to move to Austin, Texas, and build Giga Texas – the spanking new factory that’s expected to produce another gonzo Musk idea, the Tesla Cybertruck, Lawrence said.

Musk’s other companies have benefited from corporate welfare schemes, too. In 2015, LA Times reported Musk’s firms had benefited from almost $5 billion in federal support.

That includes SpaceX, which just landed a $2.89 billion contract with NASA and a $653-million air force contract, both in 2021, and SolarCity, which capitalized on $1.5 billion in government aid and hemorrhaged cash before the company was absorbed by Tesla –which accepted payroll benefits from Donald Trump’s $600 billion pandemic stimulus package.

Musk can scold work-from-homers all he wants. But when it comes to benefiting from handouts and loans, few have been rained on more than him.

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