You are way underreacting to what’s going on here. This is not about saving money, or trying to cut waste or fraud. Elon Musk has been posting wild conspiracies on X to justify what he’s doing. But the actual changes are reactionary and political. Accountability is long gone if someone like Elon is in direct charge of what bills get paid. Fraud and waste will skyrocket in these conditions.
Tesla and SpaceX ran on government money. X is doing poorly enough that he’s suing former advertisers demanding that the courts force them buy ads.
He now has significant influence over all of those things. Official government communications are only being released on X, incentivizing people to use it. The next NASA contract is going to be awarded by people who know their boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss owes his political career to the owner of one of the bidders. Last quarter, a quarter of Tesla’s net income was unrealized Bitcoin profits – and he’s pushing the government to subsidize Bitcoin so it can get the kind of adoption it hasn’t been able to achieve on merit!
This is why government ethics rules exist, and why high-level officials have public confirmation hearings. Even if he was incredibly scrupulous about not making decisions based on his own interests, it reeks of corruption and provides many avenues for potential abuse (e.g. what if China threatened to seize his factories unless he helped them get a better deal?). The federal employees he’s attacked have annual training reminding them that they can’t accept gifts over $20/year – and really shouldn’t even then – with consequences up to going to jail for a long time.
Hold on there, Tesla has repeatedly shown an amazing ability to cut costs of their products while improving functionality/quality.
Yes Tesla benefits from credits caused by other companies not meeting co2 targets set by the government but that wouldn't have been enough to save them from three near bankruptcies. And yes, they are still quite a ways away from being a leader in overall quality and consistency but yhey are executing extremly well in their R&D compared to other US car companies only to be outdone by the Chinese, certainly not any US company.
As someone solidly on the left, this has really frustrated me to no end with the typical lefist sources I watch. In 2025 Facts really matter but all I see are facts being omitted to push a narrative (ie. Elon wasn't the founder of Tesla, Tesla/SpaceX is just alive because of the government subsidizes, Elon does not know anything about how to make a car/rocket).
They cite his bad behavior or screwups in reforming Twitter but unless you have followed everything that Elon has accomplished/failed at you are lying by omission. This is especially dangerous now because by dismissing him as dumber than he really is, you are setting him up for surprise successes because people let their guard down.
This is what I see on /r/fednews at how shocked they are over how fast he is moving at his slash and burn.
You would have known this had you followed the whole Twitter saga very closely, the early days of Tesla where they ousted the original CEO for deliberately lying to the board, and the three near bankruptcies of the company where Elon pulled out hail mary after hail mary to save the company.
See this is my point. You can easily google that answer and I suspect you know it already. The entire context is missing because you are pushing your narrative. Tesla was founded by Eberhardt and Tarpenning and thats where the left always stops. Without any doubt we know that Eberhart would have tanked the company. Tesla would have been nothing without Elons involvement especially now that we know of the lies that occurred early on during Roadster. There would be no Tesla left had he continued. Leaving this out causes people to miss lessons that help them understand how Elon thinks.
Lessons such as how he brought in his fixers to go 'line by line' in the books to figure out where all the money is going: sound familiar?
>Tesla is getting cooked by Chinese carmakers and only tariffs or outright bans can help. In EU their sales are falling quickly due to his salute.
Did you not read my message completely or were you so fixated on your conclusion that you missed how I admitted that Chinese are outdoing Tesla?
Don't listen to me, heres Elon Musk talking about how good his Chinese competitors are:
"If there are no trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world," he said. "They're extremely good."
In regards to EU, yes they are sinking there, so are all the other EU companies. The Chinese will own that market. That entire continent is a sinking ship and in hindsight maybe it was a mistake to even open a factory there as im sure Musk is realizing now.
I am so disappointed that the left has apparently learned nothing from the Twitter saga and are instead relearning all the mistakes made there because they didn't pay attention the last several times this happened. Instead of downvoting figure out how you can exploit Musks's weaknesses to stop him.
So the company was founded, Elon Musk joined later and funded it. Are investors founders now or what? This isn't a leftist things, it's just reality. I'm not disputing that he was instrumental in Tesla's success, saving the company several times with new financing.
He overpaid about 20B for twitter and tanked it's value so it's almost worthless now. For example by telling advertisers to fuck off, and when they did he started suing them for doing what he told then to do. All this to turn twitter into a far right extreme and racist echo chamber to push propaganda. All regular users and companies are fleeing it to other platforms. Now he's using his position in government go force agencies to use it for communication, padding his own pockets.
I don't think there is anything I can say to knock some sense into you but i'll bite anyway.
>So the company was founded, Elon Musk joined later and funded it. Are investors founders now or what? This isn't a leftist things, it's just reality.
The left position implies or outright says that he just used his money to take over the company pushing the poor founder out. This nonsense is as far from the truth as you can imagine. Two guys that came along with no financing and just a general business plan. As the founders they were given the chance to run the company and ran it into the ground losing almost all of the investor's money. The original plan was for Elon to start his own company: A company called Faraday Motors(ironic). He was convinced by his business partner to instead join forces with these other two guys. A mistake he probably still regrets.
Is the left correct in that Elon was not the founder? Yes...are they being disingenuous? Absolutely. We can't be playing this stupid game anymore after their abysmal loss this past election.
>I'm not disputing that he was instrumental in Tesla's success, saving the company several times with new financing.
You make it sound like he just wrote a check, walked away, and it magically fixed itself. Now you are being dishonest. A lot had to happen correctly between then and now for Tesla to be where it is today and not just some distant memory.
OP made the claim "Tesla and SpaceX ran on government money." This is another disingenuous statement. Tesla utilizes a program open to any car company to encourage them to transition to ZEV. Its not Tesla's fault that other car companies still cannot take advantage of the program due to the cars that they sell. They had 10+ years to turn the ship around and many still haven't done so. It is certainly not some sweetheart deal only allocated to Tesla or even created for Tesla.
The same can be said for SpaceX: they provide a service, the government pre-paid for that service...SpaceX still has to provide the service. The left makes it sound like they are just being thrown free money.
Frankly why do you even nitpick this so much? What are you even trying to prove? My overall point was that people need to know this history so they can see his tricks coming a mile away instead of being caught off guard like many are doing right now. How is that a bad thing?
>He overpaid about 20B for twitter and tanked it's value so it's almost worthless now. For example by telling advertisers to fuck off, and when they did he started suing them for doing what he told then to do. All this to turn twitter into a far right extreme and racist echo chamber to push propaganda. All regular users and companies are fleeing it to other platforms. Now he's using his position in government go force agencies to use it for communication, padding his own pockets.
Thats just like your opinion man. Here is an alternative take: That Twitter deal in hightsight is looking to be one of the best acquisitions in the history of tech. For 44 billion (of which a lot is other people's money) he literally bought the USA. In the grand scheme of things it is chump change.
>And you still think he's a good guy.
Well I really don't know what kind of a person he is. What I do know is that he will continue to surprise you if you keep your mind closed like that.
You don't see the conflict of interest in one person both controlling how public funds are spent, and running private companies that may have those funds directed to benefit them?
When Elon runs his companies, he is beholden to shareholders to use the company's resources effectively to generate and maintain value.
Who is Elon beholden to when managing public funding and programs as an unelected non-official? Who will vote him out when he wasn't voted in? Who will revoke his confirmation when he was never confirmed?
> What is happening in DC (currently) has broad public support.
Things have been moving quite quickly, so this seems like a premature judgement. Can you cite a survey that shows that levels of support for disbanding USAID, for example; or taking over the treasury system; or "deleting" DirectFile?
I am responding to a specific comment about public support. Besides surveys, what method would you suggest for accurately determining public support for particular policies? And leave your self-satisfied partisan snark out of it.
I couldn’t care less about measuring the popularity of the President a couple weeks into the term. You could ask a fortune-telling chicken for all I care.
I’m ecstatic about everything that’s being done to make the country better right now. We’re again moving in the right direction. That’s what matters to me.
> I couldn’t care less about measuring the popularity of the President a couple weeks into the term. You could ask a fortune-telling chicken for all I care.
Then why are you responding to my objection to a post asserting the alleged popularity of current actions? Are you just interesting in spreading snark and bitterness without any thought or substance?
> I’m ecstatic about everything that’s being done to make the country better right now. We’re again moving in the right direction. That’s what matters to me.
Oh, sorry, I didn't realize that you're dumb. What's happening right now is vandalism of the government.
> So why would "fraud and waste" skyrocket under him?
TSLA doubled in value in the month after the election, despite the financials of the company going down. The only reason for the increase in share price is because the market expects Musk to benefit from Trump's corruption, in the form of less oversight and more government subsidies.
They mean that he will divert or protect payments and credits going to his own businesses or partners. His interest in capital efficiency exists to generate profit for himself, not as a blessing for other orgs he provides as a gift. He did it with Twitter/X after he became owner of its profits.
If treasury money is diverted to his private interests, that is waste and perhaps fraud. But to him it achieves the same end (personal profit) as capital efficiency of orgs under his own ownership, not just his control
Elon has gone off the reservation. Just based on his insane social media postings, he's either completely mad or is cynically pretending to be. Either way he is completely untrustworthy.
At this point, it's probably the safer bet to assume Musk isn't the primary reason those companies are capital efficient.
Maybe he runs companies like he plays video games. Someone else drives while he pretends to.
That's a very valid argument. Both SpaceX and Tesla are quite capital efficient. Maybe another angle to consider is what's being optimized for? What outcomes would be considered successful for these federal agencies? That's probably going to tell us more about whether the austerity measures that seem likely result in more efficient use of resources to create successful outcomes.
One thing that seems worth think through more is whether the stated outcomes of those agencies is what's actually be optimized for, or whether those are suborned for personal gain by a few parties.
This is not correct. SpaceX is covered by ITAR and therefore cannot hire foreigners.
Of the approximately 70,000 Tesla employees in the US, fewer than 2,000 are H-1B workers. The rest are US citizens or permanent residents. Tesla's manufacturing is much more vertically integrated than other auto manufacturers, so they rely almost entirely on their US factories to produce the cars they sell in the US. Other auto makers tend to do more manufacturing overseas to save on labor/safety/environmental costs, then do final assembly in the US to avoid tariffs.
JFC, he named a quasi-governmental agency "DOGE"! He may as well have called it "The Department of Pump"
And his buddy the president is happily sending the currency and stock markets up and down with his every idiotic tariff announcement. I wonder if the top man at DOGE is on the list of people who Trump tips off?
Musk, Trump and half this administration are off-the-charts corrupt.
