The Worst Thing About Elon Musk [View all]

Julie Roginsky

Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune is often described as a triumph of private genius, which is convenient for Musk and absurd for everyone else. The SpaceX initial public offering that pushed him into trillionaire territory did not descend from Mars fully formed. It was built on a launchpad paid for, protected, and expanded by the American taxpayer. SpaceX received a major early award under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services initiative, designed to support private companies developing cargo transportation to low-Earth orbit. NASA later awarded SpaceX billions more through commercial crew and cargo arrangements. In May, just weeks before the IPO, SpaceX won a $4.16 billion Space Force contract for threat-detection satellites.

Tesla, too, was never merely the story of a lone visionary conquering the market. In 2009, Tesla announced that it had received approval for about $465 million in low-interest Department of Energy loans from the Obama administration to accelerate electric vehicle production, including Tesla’s plug-in vehicles and the development of its Fremont manufacturing facility. By 2015, Tesla, SpaceX, and Musk’s SolarCity had benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, including loans, tax breaks, grants, factory construction, discounted financing, and environmental credits. A decade later, the scale of public support for Musk’s companies was far higher: at least $38 billion over two decades through contracts, loans, grants, and tax credits.

That is what makes the myth so obscene. Musk did not become the world’s first trillionaire by escaping government. He became the world’s first trillionaire by feeding off government and then turning around to tell everyone else that government was the problem. He built companies that depended on public risk, public contracts, public tax credits, public research, public infrastructure, and public procurement. Then, once taxpayers helped make him untouchable, he positioned himself as the man entitled to take a chainsaw to the same government that had helped make him the richest man on earth.

But the most dangerous thing about Musk’s fortune is not simply its size, grotesque though it is. It is not only that one man now possesses wealth larger than the economic output of many countries. It is that his wealth buys him something more corrosive than influence and more dangerous than the unbridled ability to double and triple his fortune.

https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/the-worst-thing-about-elon-musk