They've been having a cash crunch since day one; the only reason they exist is that the American taxpayer has been milked to the tune of $4.9 billion to support them.
Now to be fair, that's a small fraction of the taxpayer funds used to prop up a seemingly countless number of crony "capitalists".
(from Right-wing group led by Trump propagandist launches campaign against Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX https://electrek.co/2016/11/22/elon-musk-right-wing-trump-pr...)
Apparently the "Trump propagandist" was Laura Ingraham who's recently getting some news coverage.
How about not expecting taxpayers to subsidise any industry?
Quibbling about the exact dollar figure doesn't change the moral issue.
If an industry has a realistic prospect of making a serious dent in that number, subsidizing it IS the "moral" thing for a government to do, in my opinion.
It seems like crony capitalism refers to a scenario where the money from government investment goes directly to the pockets of players in the industry. (this is what is believed to have happened in Russia over the last 2 decades..one example being multi billion dollar construction projects for olympics with nothing to show for it).
That doesn't seem to be what happens in the United States (in most cases). Most major innovation still needs the government to chip in. Google's alphabet (so far) has show that this kind of innovation system is really hard for a private company to drive ever when they have almost unlimited resources. So if we have clear evidence (and we do... Moon landing , internet, electric cars, new space race, self driving ) government investment drives us forward (in aggregate) what is morally wrong about the US government participating the economy?
And not to nit pick but are you sure the dollar figure really doesn't matter? There's a profound difference between ~500 million (the loan Tesla actually got) and 4.9 billion dollars (fake number pushed by media w/ agenda)....