Subsidies Awarded to Tesla Inc: at least $2,829,855,494 and Counting
subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org
subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org
Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022
The implicit subsidies to electric car companies could similar or even greater, as it appears that most of the microplastics come from car tires, as discussed recently[0]. The impact of electric cars could be quite big because they are significantly heavier and large part of the emissions attributable to a car come at the manufacturing stage anyway.
It’s also the whole global economy, so kind of hard to compare with Tesla Inc subsidies.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37726539
Not defending the fossil subsidies, just a poor comparison.
Sorry for breaking this narrative though, apparently it's very unpopular thing to do.
https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/megadeals
Shows the companies that receive subsidies and how much. I will note that Tesla isn't close to being the largest recipient of subsidies but recieves by far the most outrage.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/6/22821532/elon-musk-biden-...
That said the article is interesting because to my eyes he's pursuing the same "pull the ladder up" mentality that all the big players do:
> Musk also said he doesn’t believe the US government should be giving out subsidies to expand charging infrastructure
Of course he'd say that (so says my suspicious brain). In 2021 Tesla had a good lock on charging infra. Subsidizing it makes it easier for competitors to get in on it.
Not sure what it means, but in 2023 Tesla's charging standard is becoming closer to "the standard."[1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/more-a...
If Musk was a standard CEO with a PR team handling all messaging, the country would still love him.
A usable definition of hypocrisy is "the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform".
In this case, a belief that car companies should not be subsidized by government while simultaneously accepting subsidies from government. The act (accepting subsidies) does not match the stated belief (shouldn't accept subsidies).
To take it a step further, he could be less hypocritical if he changed his stance to along the lines of "there shouldn't be EV subsidies unless the company needs them to stay in business", but to my knowledge that is not his position.
For example, someone could be opposed to student loan debt forgiveness in principle, but that same person would probably not rip up their check.
To build upon your examples:
Case 1 Belief: "I don't believe student loan debts should be forgiven." Action: Accepts student loan forgiveness. Outcome: Hypocritical. Action directly conflicts with the belief, ergo the belief is not truly held.
Case 2 Belief 1: "I don't believe student loan debts should be forgiven for everyone." Belief 2: "I believe I fall in the category of people who should have student loans forgiven." Action: Accepts student loan forgiveness. Outcome: Not inherently hypocritical, provided Belief 2 is expressed alongside Belief 1. Not disclosing belief 2 makes the behavior hypocritical, as to an observer only belief 1 is held.
To link this back to the example of Musk, if he expressed his belief as "I don't believe most firms need subsidies, but the ones to my firm are warranted for reason Y" that would help avoid hypocrisy. To my limited knowledge, that is not the approach he takes.
Accepting a forgiven loan is a different action - you don't believe the other person should have done it, but they did, your acceptance of that is a different matter.
Try rephrasing it into the negative: I don't believe anyone should pay sales tax. Is it hypocritical to pay sales tax when you buy something? No, it's not.
Let's play your example out in a conversation:
1: "I don't believe anyone should pay sales tax!"
2: "But you (someone who is anyone) do pay sales tax, are you a hypocrite?"
1: "Of course not. I have to, it's the law."
2: "So you believe nobody should have to pay sales tax, but they must when legally required?"
1: "Yes."
2: "Oh good, that seems reasonable. I also hate taxes."
Not giving charity while being opposed to subsidies is not hypocritical.
That's not what's happening.
Tesla is taking subsidies because they are available, it would be a poor decision not to. Tesla could take a stand and not accept subsidies but then those subsidies will fall to their competitors and they will lose.
It's like believing the presidency should be decided by the popular vote but not campaigning in California or thinking healthcare should be free but paying for insurance.
One is a belief about how things should be and the other is a reaction to how things are.
The company, its officers and directors could all be sued by shareholders in a massive class action lawsuit if they did not abide by their legal responsibilities based on personal beliefs.
Also, Elon Musk acquired solar city and then gutted it. Essentially wasting billions of Tesla shareholder dollars and he basically shrugged it off. What he did with solar city is very obviously illegal, yet the consequences have been quite insignificant. If you don't know what he did: he acquired solar city for 2.6 billion dollars to bail out his brother Kimbal Musk at the expense of public Tesla shareholders. That money literally went up in flames for nepotism. You could say that this subsidy money he took for Tesla has all gone into the solar city bailout.
Forget pollution etc with the current trajectory electric cars and solar electricity will keep getting cheaper so if US and other countries do not subsidies and promote manufacturing now they will become uncompetitive in the near future.
China is the leader in EVs at this point, like it or not.
Can be useful in many ways, for example can be a talking point about the wonders of having a federal government. Can be useful for having a context when a businessmen campaigns against taxes and subsidies. Can be used against certain businessmen claiming they did everything by themselves, unlike those unsuccessful poor people or lazy immigrants.
It's something interesting to keep in mind when demanding drastic changes on how the world should work.
In all seriousness, the argument that one benefits from the current system but advocates for a different system is not acceptable is just wrong. We can't all be living in a cabin in the woods. We're allowed to have opinions
Useful when businessmen start pretending that things are happening in a vacuum and the environment they operate exists spontaneously.
Trump is found guilty of fraud, even tho banks made money of his fraudulent deals.
This video is about fossil fuel subsidies in just one zip code which makes it the richest and poorest zip code at the same time. $2857 per capita subsidies via Industrial Tax Exemption Program. National average is $291 per capita, Texas $89 per capita. Skip to 5:22 for the explanation.
I don't think Tesla has our country's policy goals in mind.
I believe I read that Massachusetts spends something like $12,000 per capita on public roads and highways. And yet we keep telling ourselves that transit oriented development and mass transit is “expensive.”
in the status quo of typical car-focused urban development, the US government needs to subsidize EV car companies or else other countries with lower labor costs will demolish the US automotive industry and consumers will be forfeiting too much of their earnings on the basic needs of daily transportation as oil becomes more and more scarce.
The big 3 automakers are already propped up by the chicken tax. It’s no coincidence that trucks drive most of the profit of US automakers and that they’ve been moved from utilitarian work vehicles to family cars to maximize sales. If you sell a family a sedan it’ll be low profit margin, competing with dozens of other options. Sell them an F-150 and you enjoy an oligopoly with a small subset of brands that have factories in the US.
I’d like automotive subsidy to be redirected into fixing urban design mistakes and meaningfully reduce car trips per capita. I’m not talking about extreme stuff like eliminating cars entirely, I’m talking about a situation where the majority of people don’t feel the need to get in a car to meet 100% of their daily needs.
This applies to Suburbs as well. Many American cities that people think are too rural for cycling or bus service are actually very populated and only have issues with car alternatives because of planning mistakes like non-grid subdivisions, front-facing parking lots, and human-hostile road designs (no/poor bike lanes, high traffic speeds, dead space allocated for high speed traffic infrastructure like merge lanes and onramps)
The value of a human life in the US is estimated at around $10 million, so if you have 30,000 people dying in car crashes nationwide per year you’re looking at prorated losses in the hundreds of billions.
This organised propaganda against Tesla needs to stop, sure Musk is an a*hole, is he an evil a*hole like some othe CEOs? I don't know...
Electric cars are still something beneficial to the sustainability of the car industry and the environment. And Ford still got more money...
Foxconn uses slaves to make a luxury device that's marketed as environmentaly friendly because it now uses the same cable forced on it by the EU that others used for a decade... and it got more than Tesla.
Amazon is just an online store and cloud provider, and the way it treats its low level workers is as close to slavery as the law permits it to be, and it still got more etc.
I mean you can get away with a post like this on Reddit but you should at least expect HN to have people will enough critical thinking skills to see what your title is suggesting and why what it's suggesting is both wrong when put into context and also politically pushed with how much we see it repeated online.
I like your call for reason, but I think your Amazon statement is hyperbole. I’m weaning myself off Amazon, but Amazon employees aren’t anywhere close to slavery. It’s a hard job, but seems to compare really well to other competing warehouse or delivery or whatever jobs.
I feel like making inaccurate statements detracts from the core of our discussion, why is Amazon getting billions in subsidies?
I also think that these subsidies need to have a rate aspect. If a trillion dollar company gets $5B in subsidies that’s very different from a $5B company getting the same. Huge corps are huge and just by existing they are probably maximizing random subsidies so the complaint isn’t against the org, but against the governments that give them.
Hard disagree, they're a sidestep at best (batteries aren't made of magic green recycled pixie dust, the electricity to charge them doesn't come of 100% renewables, usually, tire dust still contributes massively to plastic pollution), detrimental at worst, especially when sold as an extremely shitty and inefficient alternative to public transit, as they are in the Las Vegas Loop.
> sure Musk is an ahole, is he an evil ahole like some othe CEOs? I don't know...
I mean, have you heard Bezos or anyone of his ilk actively sabotage a defensive military campaign thus enabling the continuation of genocide, or give popularity to neo-fascist talking points?
As usual, a lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
https://www.engadget.com/ukrainian-official-claims-elon-musk...
"Hi, Tim. Based on my conversations with Musk, I mistakenly thought the policy to not allow Starlink to be used for an attack on Crimea had been first decided on the night of the Ukrainian attempted sneak attack that night. He now says that the policy had been implemented earlier, but the Ukrainians did not know it, and that night he simply reaffirmed the policy." [1]
[1] twitter.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1700522506363248665
> If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation
Refusing to help the defender is siding with the offender by allowing them to continue their senseless war of agression and genocide.
> Calling someone a fascist is a pretty wild accusation, especially when it seems it was motivated by a misunderstanding.
And he isn't flirting with fascism just because he helps Russia or mocks Zelensky having to beg for help from other countries to ensure the survival of his own, but for a whole host of other reasons. Just take a scroll through his Twitter timeline and see him getting scolded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs on migrants' lives, or him commenting, liking, retweeting memes full of racist or otherwise fascist-adjacent dogwhistles.
PS: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/1/23895069/walter-isaacson-... I'm even less inclined to agree with Isaacson's statements now
Like its so clear that your constructed narrative is wrong, but you are so blinded by emotion that you are totally unable to see it. Even worse, you won't even be able to read this comment without assigning it as musk propaganda written by some drooling fan boy.
Seriously, the anti-musk people managed to become just as detached as the musk worshippers. If you want to be critical, get a grip, otherwise its easy for musk to hold up his detractors as idiots.
> I don't understand how people can exist in such a clear dissonance state (Elon provides Starklink to Ukraine as a means to help Russsia, and does not offer it to Russia), and not step back and think.
What musk did with Starlink regarding the Ukrainian planned attack was direct and active sabotage of an operation, and impeded the Ukrainian war effort. Other things he has done previously, like allowing Starlink access in Ukraine, has helped the war effort. Is that hard to comprehend? Does it have to be one or the other?
The fact that he has done some good deeds, for whatever reason, doesn't change the fact that he has done far more bad deeds. His sabotage of public transit initiatives with actively harmful efforts such as the loop and hyperloop has a direct impact. His constant lies and embellishments of technological advancements is also harmful to his customers. His sharing and endorsing fascist and Russian propaganda is also harmful to the Ukrainian war effot.
much in the same way it is easy for a clown to dangle a shiny object in front of small children, and receive cheers and applause from a similarly small minority of people, and similarly be ignored by most other people, who recognize that the clown is a clown.
But alas, it's clear you aren't actually interested in hearing the truth.
It's kind of funny on many levels that when Musk or his businesses go against the US government or don't stick perfectly to its interests, your types rush out of the woodworks screeching about how the company needs to be seized and forced into compliance. But when they carefully follow the government's position, your types rush out to argue that the company and its CEO specifically are propping up a genocide. It's a lose-lose situation and so no wonder SpaceX et al mostly don't bother commenting on the lie of the week.
Just distributing freedom to the world
>Not let people use your product to kill other people
Facism
>Refusing to help the defender is siding with the offender by allowing them to continue their senseless war of agression and genocide
So by this logic anyone who helped Iraqis kill American soldiers is a good guy and anyone who refused to help the Iraqis by default sided with the US in their senseless war of agression and genocide
I honestly wasn't going to reply because we all know how hard these narratives are pushed by real and less real people, but this feels like arguing with a jew, christian or muslim, there is no way you can convince them moises didn't split the sea / jesus didn't walk on water / muhamad didn't fly on a winged horse, despite how illogical or contradictory the stories are... So yeah go at it, history does repeat itself and there will always reality bending people who push false narratives and out of context words to commit more violence.
But honestly wtf is wrong with you? Just turn off the computer and sit down and think of what you just said, Russia's invasion is an invasion and I am a pacifist so all invasions and wars are evil in the way I see it, but was it unprovoqued? hell no... you can't just interfere with Canadian elections and put a Russian puppet there who'll eventually apply to join anti-NATO and put nukes at your borders and not expect something in return... But whatever I still see war as the epitome of evil so Putin is evil for starting that war, it's not genocidal (you can't just lie) because they're racially the same people, hell I was alive when the USSR existed and Ukraine and Russia was the same country... But me seeing war as evil implies death as evil, so had Zelensky negociated with Putin and accepted to resign or whatever just so his people didn't die I'd have admired him, but the way he went at it makes me view him as more evil than even Putin... it's like me a father, having home invaders with guns invading my house (and we only have knives) and instead of giving up and negociating whatever solution to save the lives of my children and wife, I instead arm them with knives and send them to die...
And the US in all of this? Well the US is going to do what the US always did, violence and death and war, remember in 2003 when you made fun of us (France) for not helping you with Iraq? I won't criticize your country that much since most people here are from the US and I don't want to offend everyone.
And Elon in all of this? The guy is a human he's neither Ghandi or Hitler, that splitting (black and white thinking) is the most important trait in diagnosing clusted B disorders (npd, bpd, asd and hpd) so be careful with that.
I'm a decent guy yet if I sold my shares in Paypal for 170 million $ I'd stop working and go chill in some island, let alone invest/start Tesla/SpaceX etc. he could've started a finance company or whatever if his only goal was going for a monetary high score, and he could've retired at 100 or 200 billion $. Sure electric cars aren't as environmentally friendly as previously thought today but eventually we can expect more sustainable energy production or whatever, and how the fck is SpaceX not beneficial to mankind, well it's risky because we'll eventually have lots of debris out there but let's be honest and say it would've been a hell of a lot easier to make more money in finance or some other domain, the guy at least had good intentions, and if you call him facist you're calling all of us facists as I already explained (I'm decent but still worse than him and given his money I'd be a lot worse). And don't even get me started on Twitter, the guy took a mainstream social media platform and lowered censorship on it, how the fck is this evil? What now all of a sudden censorship is good and free speech is bad? You can't have it both ways after fucking up Iraq to dust and selling it as freedom then now all of a sudden freedom is bad. If the site is full of right wing bigots it's a direct reaction to the left wing authoritarianism that's been going around lately, you can't just argue for censorship and firing people from their jobs for saying X and Y then expect the reaction to be a polite discussion over the philosophical merits of free speech, you are of course going to get the opposite of that.
And also you can't just worship the guy in 2017 then in 2018 call him Facist this isn't a healthy outlook on things. You're showing that you have no idea what true facism is, and that's where the problem is, you become a facist yourself by demonizing others over trivial things while calling them the facists. And it has always happened so you have to be careful of that it's a normal tragic human things we do and have done in all societies. The christians prosecuted the jews because they were heathens and in doing so commited true heathen crimes, the muslims prosecuted the christians because they were heathens and in doing so commited true heathen crimes, etc.
>Wikipedia: Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
So Elon isn't far-right (isn't married, doesn't criticize drugs, dresses in an edgy way, etc.), he isn't that much of an authoritarian either (hard to prove at his level because he has money so if he fires someone over something you'll twist it to argue your point, but then we're all authoritarians when it comes to us, but afaik he doesn't support any single political authoritarian regime or wishes for it to force its beliefs on people), ultranationalist (he's south african who immigrated to Canada then the US), he's not for the subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation (he was anti covid lockdowns, he's against censorship, etc.) and he's not for regimentation of society and the economy being a capitalist who never judged anyone for any habit or anything, even the women he dated were from different ideologies and had different styles.
And I didn't have to go deep to prove you wrong, I'm just an average guy, so while your discourse can fly on reddit, here everyone has access to the kind of logic I used, so why bother lying on a forum like HN if you know people will just read your comment and think "this is propaganda" and move on?
Yes
Is pointing out issues in the company that whole tech world was salivating over for almost a decade now a propaganda? A company who repeatedly lied to capitalize on the positive press?
In your post, you say that don't know. It seems others do, based on the responses to your post. I recommend those who do not know something, consult those who do, in order to learn, and thus know. As for me, it depends on whether you consider toxic narcissism "evil".
In any case, elmu's words and actions and behaviors are not those of a person seeking less attention, and for every internet plea of "leave elmu alone!", there is a twitter post by him effectively pleading "look at me!!!1", so the cries of "propaganda" ring pretty hollow.