Krystal Ball
speaker
517 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 4 May
Krystal Ball’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.
Appearances
First, let's talk about Tesla.
Tesla was struggling.
It was about to go under when Elon came hat in hand to the government and begged for a massive energy department loan to the tune of $465 million to keep that company afloat
That allowed them to build the Model S, allowed them to buy their factory in Fremont, California, and allowed that company to really take off and fight another day.
In addition...
over the years, a third of Tesla's revenue has come from federal and state subsidies.
They sell these tax credits.
So for example, in the state of California, where Tesla was based until recently, they have certain standards that automakers have to meet.
And since Tesla is zero emissions, because it's electric vehicle, they can sell those credits to other automakers.
And so they made a tremendous amount of money doing exactly that.
Those credits are actually what
allowed Tesla to become profitable in the very first year that they were able to turn a profit.
Then there's SpaceX, which if anything, is even more dependent on government money.
A majority of SpaceX revenue comes from the Defense Department and NASA.
That is where the money for SpaceX comes from.
And oh, by the way, we, the U.S.
federal government, the taxpayers, apparently, since we're on the hook for it,
have looked the other way as SpaceX missed milestone after milestone.
That's according to congressional investigators, who said the subsidies and the funding kept coming, even though SpaceX routinely failed to deliver.
All this led Jeff Bezos to say, Elon's real superpower is getting government money.
Showing 401–420 of 517 · page 21 of 26
← Previous
Next →