Tesla got a $465M loan from the government in Aug 2009 and finished paying it off last year with interest.
Ford received a $5.9 BILLION loan from the feds and plans to pay it off over 20 years. Tesla has no other government funds.
SpaceX funding has all been private to the tune of about $1.2B. SpaceX launch contracts are 2/3 private 1/3 NASA. NASA granted a $1.2B contract to SpaceX and made an advance payment of $278M. It would cost the taxpayers about $2B if NASA made those launches themselves.
Don’t know much about Solar City.
Exactly right. I very much admire Elon Musk;I think he’s brilliant. He’s getting a lot of flack lately because *gasp* he wants to sell his cars directly to the owner. States are under pressure from auto dealers. Heaven forbid we cut out the middleman. Likely one of the great inventors of our age. Not to mention he’s a LEGAL immigrant.
Tesla is making money on carbon credits now.
Solar City is making money from the Chinese solar panels it has installed on schools and military installations (where they rent them).
Space X has a manifest of government and commercial contracts (a few have flown).
It seems a lot of taxpayer money has found its way into Musk’s pocket - and the profit will be all his. In coming years we will be paying through the nose for energy, rocket rides and private transportation -— just watch.
Wrong. It took about a decade and a bit over a billion dollars for SpaceX to develop the Falcon 9 launcher. Of that amount, about $800 million was federal grants and subsidies from both NASA and DoD.
The great "money saving" contract to SpaceX to deliver cargo to ISS is no bargain either. That 12 flight contract costs the government $1.6 billion or, $133 million per flight. The up-mass for a single Falcon 9/Dragon is 7300 lbs. That costs out at $18,219 per pound of supplies delivered to ISS.
For comparison, the costs of delivery to ISS by Shuttle were around $10,000 per pound. That makes SpaceX about 80% more expensive than Shuttle, at least for this purpose.
SpaceX and most of "New Space" are not "private enterprise" -- they are simply money-grubbing contractor leeches with better public relations skills than Boeing and LockMart.