Comment by WarmWash 3 days ago
Trust me, I hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer
But just to keep the story straight
Tesla received ~$3 billion in subsidies.
When Elon exercised his Tesla options in 2021, he paid $11 billion in taxes on it.
By all accounts those subsidies were an incredibly good use of taxpayer money, and similar subsidies should keep being handed out, even if the byproduct is another big troll on twitter.
If you even read the article you linked, you'd be aware the source of the money there is from other vehicle manufacturers to Tesla not from govt/tax payers.
I'm not saying that, it's strictly true.
Tesla was given $3 billion in government subsidies.
It made $11 billion selling regulatory credits created by government regulation.
I'm not interested in getting bogged down in how actually government regulation is the same thing as subsidy even though the taxpayer doesn't foot the bill (but does collect the tax on the backend of it.) There is a good reason why subsidy and regulation are not the same interchangeable word. I suppose that without glasses of nuance/understanding they blur together and look the same (government action -> money for someone), but lets wear glasses here.
The original argument was that Tesla made a substantial amount of its revenue from subsidization, i.e., government mandated payments extracting money from one set of people to fund another. Subsidies can entail direct taxation, followed by payment to a company. Alternatively, they revolve around regulatory schemes that mandate transfer payments from one group (in this case, ICE car manufacturers and their customers) to another (EV manufacturers.) Although the mechanism is slightly different, they're both subsidies. To be clear: I have no problem with these subsidies! Just think your pedantry is misfiring.
How should we calculate the enormous subsidy they received through high tariffs against their competitors?
> Trust me, I hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer
But then you go to defend them as if it were something you're obligated to do. I think you demonstrably do not hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer.
No I hate disinformation that makes people on my side look uninformed and stupid.
On a deeper level, I hate bandwagons because they are invariably full of idiotic parrots.
Elon has done a enough demonstrably stupid and bad shit that we don't need to play deception to drum up resistance. Especially when that deception plays on "government subsides in the green sector have been a colossal waste of money".
I call this the 12 fingered hitler, frequently seen on reddit.
It goes like this:
Person A makes up some unsupported fact about a despised figure. For example, "Hitler had 12 fingers".
Person B comes in and says "I think Hitler just had 10 fingers like normal"
And then person A or some other person responds "holy shit dude, I can't believe you're defending Hitler!"
Exactly
And then neo nazis go around telling susceptible people "Look, Hitler's detractors think he had 12 fingers, just look at any picture of him, he clearly only has 10. You're gonna trust people that stupid to be honest about him? To know anything about him?"
Disinformation feels good in the moment, but is immensely damaging overall. Even the people who believed he had 12 fingers will feel betrayed and question everything else when they one day learn he actually had 10.
Dunno where that $3 billion comes from; tesla made 11 billion in regulatory credits alone: https://insideevs.com/news/767939/tesla-regulatory-credit-11...