Musk is a genius at bilking taxpayers of our money and getting government to happily go along with it.
Do your companies accomplish more than Musk’s companies?
Do they employ more Americans than Musk’s companies?
The president is eliminating the gov’t subsidy for electric cars, wind mills, solar panels, etc...this was announced late last year.
Those subsidies, while wrong, do not take away from Musk’s accomplishments.
SpaceX being by far the most important. Tesla? Not so much. Other than providing him with excellent cash flow via the companies stock and the over priced fire starters on wheels that the libs love so much.
Agreed—long past time to shut Musk off the public teat.
Whatever you think of his politics and/or methods, the man is a visionary - watching those rockets land should be enough to convince folks that he has a lot of brainpower.
I have been to Musk’s SpaceX rocket factory at Hawthorne several times. Thirty years ago I was a frequent visitor (being a manufacuring contrator/consultant) at all the big aerospace manufacturers at the time, from Aerojet to TRW. So I have some grounds for comparison.
What Musk has done is less Thomas Edison than Henry Ford. He figured out how to make his process cheap and reliable. Its not by high tech that SpaceX has done this, but by good old engineering, industrial methods, process design, standardization, cost controls, and mass production.
In the old days, and among his current competitors, too much was and still is one-off, custom, its always some sort of prototype. Musk has done real things, great things.
Yeah we should of given those energy subsidies to Dem insiders and Chinese industry instead. And obviously paying a fixed price for actual space launches are way better at siphoning cash out of NASA than for example spending 10x as much on endless "studies" to prop up the space-industrial complex (and diversity goals) while never launching a single f***ing payload on a US sourced rocket.
I see this gripe time and time again. Musk worked the system just like all the competition but never let that become a primary goal. It was necessary but ancillary to getting where they are now. Not everything was successful either.