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You know what’s ironic is that Tesla survived because of Obama era subsidies. They were desperate to get one private enterprise to succeed because so many solar
by lvl155 2y ago
You know what’s ironic is that Tesla survived because of Obama era subsidies. They were desperate to get one private enterprise to succeed because so many solar and other “clean” energy private ventures failed during that period. So, in my view, Obama created Elon. Now the rest of America has to deal with it in addition to the abject failure that is PPACA which ballooned US healthcare costs (not that Republicans have any alternative solutions or the desire to fix it).
- TheGamerUncle 2y agoDang are we back to the years of the "Thanks Obama" I guess we truly live at the end of history and have no option but to rehash the classics, don't we ?
- lvl155 2y agoSorry for the political comment but every time I see Tesla financials I think “this company should’ve failed in 2014 but-for those subsidies and ill-conceived carbon credits.”
- OnlineGladiator 2y agoAnd the only reason most domestic airlines, car manufacturers, and some of the largest financial institutions still exist is because of multiple bailouts. It's not like Tesla is unique in being helped by the government.
- roenxi 2y agoIndeed. If the government makes a habit of bailing out all the failures, eventually the system will be dominated by failures because they never get cleaned out. Still doesn't imply that bailing out failures was a good idea though.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- iforgot22 2y agoI'll stop "thanking" Obama for the ACA when health premiums go back to something sensible. But honestly I liked everything else about him.
- analog31 2y agoACA was not intended to address costs. It was a compromise to expand access without threatening the insurance industry. A more comprehensive reform had just failed.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoLet's think a lot more widely here: how many things in your life suddently got explosively more expensive over a decade. How many of those do you think would have not surged if it wasn't for [insert single thing here]? It's the same logic people use to suppress minimum wage. But prices keep going up. Almost like that's not as big a factor as we thought.
- iforgot22 2y agoHow many other things in my life suddenly doubled in price within a couple of years? Can't think of any. I know prices of everything tend to double every 10-20 years, but that's what happens when you double the money supply every 10 years.
- grahamj 2y ago[dead]
- downrightmike 2y agoObama didn't make the Grifter, the grifter has a long history of grifting.
- kjksf 2y agoIn 2024 Tesla sold more cars than Audi, employs 120 thousand people and accumulated $30 billion of cash from yearly cash flow. But yeah, the guy that runs that company is a grifter.
- johnnyanmac 2y agohow many did he lay off in 2024? How many recalls did they have? How much did he spend to buy the election? if all you care about is raw numbers, you'll fall for the grift everytime.
- arcmechanica 2y agoThey only do so much because the Nazi-grifter is focused on the latest grift
- oskarkk 2y agoAlso, under Obama SpaceX got it's first big contracts from NASA, without which SpaceX wouldn't exist today. That was a risky bet then, but the government got a really good return on that investment.
- dzonga 2y agoup until I read how elon made his money - no majority of it didn't come from paypal or zip2. but from gvt contracts or loans. that's when I learned I'm playing the wrong game by trying to provide private services instead of targeting gvt.
- peanuty1 2y agoIsn't PayPal where he got the startup capital for Tesla and SpaceX?
- oskarkk 2y agoYeah, he made his first big money from PayPal (I think around $300M), and then invested most of that money in SpaceX and Tesla, and that's how he became a billionaire.
- dzonga 2y ago180m after taxes -> 100m to spacex / 70m to tesla / 10m to solarcity. remember before the gvt pumped money into his companies they were on the brink of bankruptcy. once they got the nasa contract spacex immediately got profitable. which allowed musk to use spacex money to loan to tesla. n also use the govt loan to tesla to make the save the company. gist of the story - the money is in gvt. same applies to thiel.
- culi 2y agoWell his first startup capital would be from his parents that own diamond (blood, not synthetic) mines in South Africa. That's how he and his brother started Zip2. That got bought out and left Musk with an extra $22 million. He then started x.com which, by all accounts of people who worked there, was a total failure. In all ways but one: they were the first federally insured online bank. That's why Confinity (which owned PayPal) bought x.com (and then killed it. Because they only wanted the legal benefits not the product itself). That's when Musk truly became rich But you're right that government contracts are the way you truly get rich. A lot of people don't realize California's biggest export is airplanes and airplane parts (a business run on gov't contracts) not Silicon Valley. All of Musk's ventures (Tesla, SpaceX, Boring, solar, etc) rely on heavy subsidization/contracts with gov'ts. All of his ventures are some of the most heavily subsidized companies in the US[0] and he's been sued in several countries over subsidy fraud [0] https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc
- kjksf 2y ago> so many solar and other “clean” energy private ventures failed during that period You can't even see you contradict yourself. If all companies were supported by Obama but they all failed, but not Tesla, it wasn't Obama who made companies succeed but Musk who made Tesla succeed. Not to mention you fail to enumerate those supposed subsidies. The only significant think I know about is $465 million LOAN in 2010, which Tesla quickly and fully paid off. Compare that to $13.4 billion loan to GM in 2008 from Bush and additional $50 billion in 2009 to bail them out from bankruptcy. The Government (i.e. tax payers) lost $10 billion. GM would surely not exist if not for the tens of billions of loans. Musk would probably find a way to make Tesla work even without the $465 million loan. I hope you see how biased your take is. You harp on Tesla benefiting from gov support while ignoring that many other companies also get support and direct competitors like GM got 20x more support.
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- johnnyanmac 2y ago>it in addition to the abject failure that is PPACA which ballooned US healthcare costs (not that Republicans have any alternative solutions or the desire to fix it) quite an understatement: they broke it whlie Obama was still in office. regardless, the idea was good but good ideas always have bad actors. It's easy to forget that Musk of 2008 had a very different image compared to Musk of today.