Air Pollution is estimated to cause ~200,000 early deaths annually in the US. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223101...

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.

Taxpayers actually subsidize almost every industry. States and various local governments give tons of incentives and loans of different kinds to projects / startups and companies for different reasons. (one popular reason is generally to get companies to create jobs in their area), but the US federal government will also fund private enterprise which could create new and emerging industries. The government usually does this for it's own self interest. The government wants to take on these projects to boost the economy or industries. Using perfect economics... it's not optimal not to pick winners in a market but the world has a funny way of making things more complex than basic economic models (ex the energy industry, where overtime it is not advantageous to allow the market to pick non renewable resources but the market still might until everything is gone :) )

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)....

Most of this stuff is not subsidy in the sense of the govt/taxpayers writing a cheque to the company. They are tax breaks where the company writes a cheque to government but a smaller one than they might of otherwise. As to why have tax breaks - why not? Rather than have every company pay 35% of profits why not have deductions for this and that? Pretty much all countries do it to some extent. Admittedly its a problem if the system gets corrupted and you get things like hedge funders only paying 15% mostly because the donate to the right politicians/lobbyists.