Good. Name one major technological innovation that was not largely or wholly a product of government subsidies. The only ones I can think of were out of Bell Labs and Bell was a government backed monopoly so they don't really count. They were so profitable and protected they could spend like a government.
Nothing new is ever profitable until you get past the early prototype and scaling stages. For big capital intensive stuff only government historically has pockets deep enough to burn enough money to get big stuff off the ground (sometimes literally). Rockets, jet engines, microprocessors, huge scale power grids, the Internet, genomics, supercomputing, nuclear power, solar power, the list goes on and on.
Private investors just have too low a risk tolerance and too short a time horizon.
I actually wish this weren't so, but it is so.
It's also terribly hypocritical to bash Elon for taking government contracts when everyone does it. Why do you think Amazon's HQ2 is going to be in the DC area?
how am I personally benefitting from Elon Musk being a billionaire, taxpayer dollars shouldn't be reaching his pockets at that volume (meanwhile he prevents his employees from unionizing and suppresses injury reports at the cost of employee health...)
To be fair Musk was a billionaire before Tesla, and considering a company like fox Conn getting 3 billion or $230,000 a job to make a plant in Wisconsin, Tesla getting a subsidy is par for the course.
Tesla proved the EV market and made EVs sexy and cool, which is helping tip EVs into the mass market. Without Tesla you wouldn't see BMW, Mercedes, VW, Nissan, etc. making mass market and luxury EVs. They'd be making no EVs at all or awful "compliance cars" designed to be undesirable. (The traditional auto industry is full of ICE heads and hates EVs. They have to be dragged kicking and screaming.)
If EVs weren't tipping we'd still be talking about how peak oil (the depletion of easy/cheap oil) means the end of modern transportation.
Tesla didn't make Musk a billionaire. The PayPal acquisition did that.
Does Tesla even still get subsidies? They got that DOE loan years ago but they paid it back and lots of other auto makers got government loans back then too. Or are you referring to EV tax credits? In that case those are also subsidizing Nissan, BMW, GM, and any other company selling a mass market EV.
this reminds of investments in research and I'm quoting from somewhere but cannot locate at the moment...
If Balmer hadn't studied spectral lines, Planck may not have proposed the quantum. Then Bohr may
not have conceived his model of the atom, which means Heisenberg and Schrödinger wouldn't have
developed their formulations of quantum mechanics. That would have left Bloch without the tools he
needed to understand the nature of conduction in metals, and then how would Schottky have figured
out semiconductors? It's hard to imagine, then, how Bardeen, Brattain, and Schockley would have
developed transistors. And without transistors, Noyce and Kilbey couldn't have produced integrated
circuits.
Almost every major technological advance of the 20th and 21st centuries originated with basic
research that presented no obvious or immediate economic benefit. That means no profit motive, and
hence no reason for the private sector to adequately fund it. Basic research isn't a waste of tax
dollars; it's a more reliable long-term investment than anything else in the Federal government's
portfolio.
You're comparing scientific research to for-profit industry.
Solar City, Tesla, The Boring Company, and Space X aren't releasing public research, it's all private IP and manufacturing.
You literally could not benefit from their progress if you wanted to. You'd be sued. Their employees can't even work in related industries due to somewhat spurious non-competes.
everyone benefits from Tesla's progress [0], they may be an outlier but I think they are leading the way. More importantly, the progress helps society as a whole. I see their progress as directly benefiting every human and the planet.
you have changed your original comment a few times so it is difficult to respond to, but I'm not sure large tech companies would succeed with unions, people need to educate themselves and learn how to negotiate in highly skilled areas, I look at a local railroad company near me that employs a lot of people and does not invest money in improvements because they cannot afford due to how the union has negotiated, it has stopped innovation entirely. Engineers are still learning light switches, this should be completely automated so we stop having mistakes of train engineers texting people and causing accidents... what a shameful loss of life.
I have not changed my original comment in over 12 hours.
Their progress is not available for public use, period. Go ahead, try to use any technology developed by Tesla and see what happens. They're simply popularizing their own products.
Nothing new is ever profitable until you get past the early prototype and scaling stages. For big capital intensive stuff only government historically has pockets deep enough to burn enough money to get big stuff off the ground (sometimes literally). Rockets, jet engines, microprocessors, huge scale power grids, the Internet, genomics, supercomputing, nuclear power, solar power, the list goes on and on.
Private investors just have too low a risk tolerance and too short a time horizon.
I actually wish this weren't so, but it is so.
It's also terribly hypocritical to bash Elon for taking government contracts when everyone does it. Why do you think Amazon's HQ2 is going to be in the DC area?
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