On the plus side, you get first principles thinking, bull in a china shop unstoppability. You get important progress in rocket technology (reuse and radically lower cost per kg delivered). You get electric vehicles that people want to buy, at scale, after decades of slow walking by the rest of the industry.
On the minus side, you get the naive notion that Twitter could be made radically more "free" without turning into a cesspool that loses the bulk of its mainstream audience.
I suggest that someone who can spend 40 billion of a social media platform doesn't need taxpayers to give him quite as much assistance as he gets.
Yeah, but unlike Boeing/ULA and others who just milked the government for its cash and lobbied for further pork all the fucking time while delivering shit, Musk's leadership actually made real progress out of the cash they got from the government.
> The same subsidies he now things aren't needed, that others don't need subsidies because he doesn't need them anymore.
What Musk has realized is that most of the current political and economic leaders aren't interested in progress, only in filling their bank accounts. So why hand out subsidies to people that will only put them to waste anyway? And yes, Musk is also interested in filling his bank account, but it's undeniable he's pushing his people to leave a lasting legacy for society.
Personally, I believe that government subsidies for progressive projects are a good idea in principle, but their allocation should be completely restructured for projects above ~10M dollars: instead of lump sums that are doled out, they should be structured into quarterly payments and clearly tied to reaching milestones. No more "pork projects" that only serve to reelect corrupt politicians.