Elon Musk:
The Biggest Hog Feeding at the Federal Trough

Mar 3, 2025

Elon Musk has been all over the news this month, on his “quest” to make indiscriminate cuts to the federal government. But Elon Musk owes many of his billions to direct subsidies from the federal government to his companies.

The Washington Post reported this week that Musk’s companies received at least 38 billion dollars, making him “one of the greatest beneficiaries of the taxpayers’ coffers.” Nearly two-thirds of that money was handed over just in the last five years. And Musk’s companies are slated to receive 11.8 billion more in the next five years. Moreover, Post reporters noted Musk companies receive contracts with the Department of Defense and similar agencies whose amounts are not publicly available—so the amounts are even higher.

Much of that money was key to the development of his companies, in particular Tesla and SpaceX.

In 2008, Musk applied for a 465 million dollar loan for Tesla from the Department of Energy. He was only able to land the loan through the direct intervention of the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson. The loan came in in 2010, allowing the company to buy a factory in Fremont, California, and to engineer and assemble its Model S sedan. According to a former high-level Tesla employee, without that, “Tesla would not have survived…. It was a critical loan at a critical time.”

Tesla received 11.4 billion dollars in regulatory credits from federal and state governments; they get these credits because their cars are electric. They sell the “credits” to other companies that do not produce enough “clean” vehicles. Tesla’s first profitable quarter in 2013 was due to those credits. In 2020, Tesla would have shown a 700-million-dollar loss for the year, based on sales revenue. But with the government subsidy, the company instead booked 862 million in profit—its first profitable year. About a third of Tesla’s 35 billion in profits since 2014 came from these credits.

Tesla has also received outside handouts from state and local governments. For example, nearly three billion dollars from the state of Nevada, and 750 million dollars from New York, because it opened a medium-sized factory in Buffalo.

Tesla also benefits from the $7,500 credit given to buyers of electric vehicles. But Musk wants to end this credit—Tesla is established now; in his own words, he thinks ending the credit “will be devastating for our competitors.”

Similarly, Musk’s SpaceX was nurtured in its early years by both NASA and the Department of Defense, benefiting from advice and money long before sending anything into orbit. NASA gave SpaceX more than a billion dollars to ferry astronauts and materials to the International Space Station. The president of SpaceX herself said in an interview, “I don’t know what life would look like without that program for SpaceX…. We wouldn’t have this beautiful factory; we wouldn’t have this beautiful conference room with these incredibly comfy chairs. Yes, this is as much NASA as it is SpaceX here.”

Jeff Bezos, Musk’s competitor—and owner of The Washington Post—was undoubtedly jealous when he said, “Elon’s real super power is getting government money.”