that's when I learned I'm playing the wrong game by trying to provide private services instead of targeting gvt.
remember before the gvt pumped money into his companies they were on the brink of bankruptcy. once they got the nasa contract spacex immediately got profitable. which allowed musk to use spacex money to loan to tesla. n also use the govt loan to tesla to make the save the company.
gist of the story - the money is in gvt. same applies to thiel.
But you're right that government contracts are the way you truly get rich. A lot of people don't realize California's biggest export is airplanes and airplane parts (a business run on gov't contracts) not Silicon Valley. All of Musk's ventures (Tesla, SpaceX, Boring, solar, etc) rely on heavy subsidization/contracts with gov'ts. All of his ventures are some of the most heavily subsidized companies in the US[0] and he's been sued in several countries over subsidy fraud
[0] https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc
quite an understatement: they broke it whlie Obama was still in office.
regardless, the idea was good but good ideas always have bad actors. It's easy to forget that Musk of 2008 had a very different image compared to Musk of today.
Still doesn't imply that bailing out failures was a good idea though.
It's the same logic people use to suppress minimum wage. But prices keep going up. Almost like that's not as big a factor as we thought.
I know prices of everything tend to double every 10-20 years, but that's what happens when you double the money supply every 10 years.
You can't even see you contradict yourself.
If all companies were supported by Obama but they all failed, but not Tesla, it wasn't Obama who made companies succeed but Musk who made Tesla succeed.
Not to mention you fail to enumerate those supposed subsidies.
The only significant think I know about is $465 million LOAN in 2010, which Tesla quickly and fully paid off.
Compare that to $13.4 billion loan to GM in 2008 from Bush and additional $50 billion in 2009 to bail them out from bankruptcy.
The Government (i.e. tax payers) lost $10 billion.
GM would surely not exist if not for the tens of billions of loans.
Musk would probably find a way to make Tesla work even without the $465 million loan.
I hope you see how biased your take is.
You harp on Tesla benefiting from gov support while ignoring that many other companies also get support and direct competitors like GM got 20x more support.
But yeah, the guy that runs that company is a grifter.
if all you care about is raw numbers, you'll fall for the grift everytime.