content: Of all federal subsidies for Musk's companies, almost none have gone to his companies directly. The biggest incentive, by far, is that consumers get up to a 30% tax credit (not even a refund!) on the purchase of a solar installation. That incentive reduces over time automatically and hits 0% as soon as 2021. Compare this to oil which is in the same energy industry. Dig an oil well and the company digging that well gets a 100% tax rebate. And the company also gets 15% of their oil revenue to be 100% tax free, and more. This is a nonexhaustive list of our oil subsidies. Those oil subsidies have only been expanded over time, and are permanent. As for the state incentives the biggest one was for the Gigafactory. It's the same sort of incentives football stadiums use. That thing is going to bring in tens of billions of dollars in investment, generate thousands of jobs, and one can only imagine how much in various taxes. So states/cities compete and bid to be the location where these facilities end up getting setup at. Let's not even get into the automotive industry where our government literally gave Tesla's competitors about $80 billion in the automotive bailout just to keep the  ffa  m from failing in the great automotive bailout. This is ultimately as big a nonissue as there is. Do you think Elon should have prevented the federal government from giving tax rebates to customers? Just ridiculous. The only reason these rebates exist is as a conciliation to make our bias towards oil seem slightly less absurd than it really is.