Amid Elon Musk’s whirlwind campaign to cut thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in government services in the name of efficiency, a bombshell report Wednesday revealed a staggering amount of taxpayer cash that goes directly to him.
The richest man in the world is one of the biggest earners paid from public money, the Washington Post found.
A deep dive into government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits found the South African billionaire has reaped $38 billion dollars of government cash.
The Post reported the payments started more than 20 years ago, as Musk secured a low-interest loan from the Energy Department as CEO of the then-struggling Tesla. That department is one of many now hit by mass layoffs and cuts led by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The Post spoke to unnamed sources from inside the government to back up its story.
Almost two-thirds of the cash came in the past five years, according to the report. Just last year, at least $6.3 billion was committed to Musk’s companies. They included cash to build a Tesla factory and NASA contracts to his company SpaceX to aid the moon program.
“The total amount is probably larger: This analysis includes only publicly available contracts, omitting classified defense and intelligence work for the federal government,” the Post reported.
It went on, “The Post found nearly a dozen other local grants, reimbursements and tax credits where the specific amount of money is not public.”
The report also found 52 contracts with seven government agencies that are set to pay another $111.8 billion over the next few years. All seven agencies have come under DOGE’s microscope.
While Musk is not a paid government employee, he was a massive funder of now-President Donald Trump’s election campaign and is now a central part of his advisory team. He also heads DOGE, which he claims will slash trillions of dollars in government waste.
Musks’s part in the Trump administration has raised many red flags among onlookers about major conflicts of interest.
“Not every entrepreneur at this scale has been this dependent on federal money — certainly not Nvidia, not Microsoft, nor Amazon, nor Meta,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management.
Corpos always use socialism to their full advantage, and then they privatize their resulting profits. This is Business 101 now, in the US at least.
The shocking part is that the rich have been able to convince so many that they take no corporate handouts, or at least that they don’t rely on them, so that some people genuinely believe you can get that rich by hard work alone.
The reality is, the only way to get that rich (aside from starting as a nepo-baby, which so often is the case) is by stealing from others. Whether that theft is wage theft or taking corporate handouts (=taxpayer dollars) without paying equally or more back into the system – it’s all still theft.
Bombshell suggests shocking. I’m bored.
Cool, can I have $228 then?
Because that’s how much you’ve given (on average) to Musk in taxes thus far over the years. It’s going to go up to about $600 when you file for 2025, because that phat $38 billion is set to grow to $117 billion. I mean, if you don’t mind giving the world’s richest man a couple of hundred bucks, why not your friendly neighborhood Lemming Man?
My venmo is [email protected]
“Every billion saved is a billion for me” - Musk
We already know that dude is the biggest govy welfare queen. This is about directing as much funding to himself as possible while simultaneously destroying the US.
Elon Musk sucks the government teat at level of 525 000 average welfare receipients (6.3B/yr divided by $1000/mo for an average welfare recipient). Hey Republicans, the King of Welfare Queens is right in front of you!
Socialism for billionaires, not for regular citizens…
I’m sure he’ll feel entitled to any “savings” he finds.
I believe it is entirely true.
But can you really call this a bombshell? Didn’t everyone already know this? A bombshell should be shocking, shattering, or impactful. This is like dropping a match into a forest fire.
I dunno. $38 billion buys a lot of bomb shells.
For context, the GDP for the entire state of Vermont is $40 billion. Not tax revenue, either - GDP. So imagine a state’s entire economic profit for a year being paid to just one person… and that person then proceeds to use the money to overthrow our government.
So yeah, dunno about you, but it certainly made my head explode when I read it.
These articles are trash.
There’s obviously a lot to hate about Musk, but Nasa says we want someone to build this, SpaceX bids for a contract and wins. This isn’t welfare queen stuff.
SpaceX is saving the government 10s of billions of dollars compared to if anyone else was doing it as they can bid lower due to their reusable first stages.
Also that DOE loan Tesla got, paid back in full early. Wanna talk about auto oem bailouts (not loans) that weren’t paid back?
Also a lot of money that comes from building a factory isn’t actually cash in hand, it’s tax benefits. If you build this billion dollar factory we’ll charge you less property tax for 20 years if you employ 15,000 people in 5 years kinda thing. It’s less revenue but it’s not money out of hand.
No, your take is absolute garbage, and I’m sick of this Musk cult bullshit, so I’m going to let the much more eloquent Upper Ape explain it to you, bullet point by bullet point:
It’s genuinely amazing how little people know about Elon Musk.
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Musk went to school for economics. Claims he graduated in 1995. Records show he didn’t.
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he used his daddy’s money to start a company Zip2 with Greg Kouri that was little more than archiver (think: yellow pages). It wasn’t special or even that impressive until he hired actual computer scientists who had to clean up all his awful code but he convinced AltaVista to buy them out and made $20m. This is the only real thing Musk ever created (even though others had to fix his mess).
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Musk’s school suddenly remembers that Musk did go to school and gives him two HONORARY degrees in economics and physics, despite no records whatsoever that he did any requisite physics courses.
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Musk joined Paypal where he was quickly banned from the board for being a fucking idiot, having stupid ideas, and slowing progress because he needed to be caught up. He kept fucking with the code so they gave him dummy code to busy himself with. When he found out, he demanded access and they gave it to him with a keytracker and deleted any changes he made every time he tried to push to stack. Eventually Peter Theil had to rescue the company from Musk by ousting him.
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Musk founded Space X, a company built on the promise to get to Mars and funded by his Paypal pay out, partnering with the Mars Oasis project to trick the government to essentially privatize…NASA. The government did not give NASA enough money to pursue projects and a lot of them were shuttered. Musk took those projects and eventually bullshit promised his way to petitioning investors and the government to pay him to run it and “get to mars” and throwing random dates around. And got it. Because they’re fucking idiots and he had a bullshit reputation as being a science-man. All this Space X tech would have been better funded directly if owned by the public, but instead it’s tax payer’s money paying tax payer’s tech with a middle man who got to play around but wasn’t part of any of their key decisions or engineering. He DID make a lot of bullshit promises as he always does, and tries to make rocket catches these “viral events” by forcing everyone to do old NASA cheers and the rest.
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Tesla founders (Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning) were impressed by him when reaching out to investors, and once he was on board, he strong-armed his way to becoming the CEO, fucked everything up, slowed everything down with stupid ideas, fired a lot of crucial people, and eventually forced the founders out by reneging on his agreement but threatening lawsuits and money to get what he wants..
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He then fucked Tesla up by delaying everything, and eventually scored government grants to create EV stations that would ONLY work with Teslas and no other EV’s (basically fucking up and slowing down the EV market). And he finally got his taste of how to make real money: not helping to change the world but exploiting people who want to change the world; i.e. gullible politicians and tax payer money.
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Musk also realized he could lie without consequences. He would just make extravagant promises and never deliver and faced no consequences.
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He founded Solar City with his brother where he made an infamous announcement that all the houses around him were actually built to harness solar power. They weren’t. It was a complete lie. They were just normal houses. He got a lot of tax payer money.
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He hated public transport as a competitive alternative to his Teslas and start petitioning the government to give him money to create a network of underground tunnels with the Boring Company. Which he was given because they’re fucking idiots and he had a bullshit reputation as being a science-man. He blew a ton of tax payer money and most of it is unfinished and unusable.
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He kept leveraging/demanding Tesla to keep giving him money as his own personal ATM. And it worked. Over and over.
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Musk makes a name for himself by being in Iron Man and impressing stupid hollywood and stupid tech companies and getting on SNL where he surprised everyone by saying he’s autistic (he’s never been professionally diagnosed…ever).
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Musk said stupid shit about Twitter and was forced to buy it in the most infamous, embarrassing, and expensive fuck up in the history of business. Twitter was THE FIRST TIME he ran a company himself completely. You know how badly he embarrassed himself.
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Musk gets more political. Re-instates a lot of neo-nazi accounts and promoting nazi parties. Spreads nazi propaganda and anti-semitism. Is accused of anti-semitism. Goes to Israel to meet Netanyahu to prove he’s not anti-semitic in which his own biographer describes was bizarre since “musk didn’t seem to give a shit about Auschwitz or any of it; it was pure publicity”.
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Musk started Starlink, which he (again) was leveraged against the government and used grants and subsidies to launch NASA tech. He essentially started filling the government’s own orders until the government became dependent on him. Which they wouldn’t have been had the government just better funded NASA and these projects directly. Allowing Musk to now use Starlink as leverage against countries like Ukraine.
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Musk interferes with elections, calls Putin, does a ton of surgeries to his jaw and neck and back and fucks himself up badly and is addicted to ketomine, ADHD meds, does a Nazi salute, and is dismantling the government with his MBA-style Tiktok-CEO approach to running companies with a bunch of teenagers off 4chan.
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And that doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of his personal life, his obsessive cosmetic surgeries, his terrible relationship with his kids and ex’s, his weird breeding/magic-semen kink, exposed himself to a SpaceX flight attendant and tried to get her to have sex with him for a horse, his bizarre insults of a heroic diver dismissing his stupid ideas, his complete 180 on nearly all his ideologies, his
amazingly brilliantidiotic “smart man” ideas about time travel and human nature, embarrassed himself with Dave Chappelle and got booed so bad he had a meltdown, and that hilarious poll where he promised to step down as the head of twitter based on the poll results, didn’t like the results so he changed it and re-polled, lost again, promised to step down and then just…pretended none of that ever happened.
He’s not just a conman, he’s also an idiot. He’s always been the biggest idiot in every room he’s in. He’s motivated and aggressive…but also just a fucking idiot with thin skin, a huge ego, and sociopathic tendencies. He’s failed upwards his whole life because people fell for his act.
Same as Trump, who lied about being a billionaire to Forbes and used the reputation to keep loans and investments coming.
These are the two leaders of the US.
So he’s essentially Trump’s twin.
Great copy pasta you got there.
Doesn’t negate what I said.
Yeah it does lol
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