just playing devil's advocate for Musk here.A rebuttal to Lauren Chen's and Elon Musk's opinions on the need to rid of all subsidies...and the value of Federal investments that brought about the advancements in the world's economy brought forth by the spending Lauren and Elon seem to have forgotten.
When Telsa came to existence, auto and petro industry has already received subsidies for decades. Subsiding a promising new industry made sense and was fair. But he is talking about NOW and I think getting rid of subsides might be better for the US. it will more quickly kill all the dead cats like GM and Ford instead of keeping them artificially alive. the resulting monopoly of Telsa will strengthen US position in the global market against Chinese/german/Japanese car makers. I think that could be on the mind of Musk.
SpaceX got gov contracts, not really subsidies. But I see the US is trying to spread the eggs with ULA and BlueOrigin. Again I think the US will create a bigger lead if they concentrate NASA/DOD contracts to SpaceX.
Monopoly often breed complacency. but so far there have been no evidence of that with either of Musk's companies. Of course there are risks. But I would bet (in national strategy, not stock price) on Musk's companies than their US competitors. I think China merged the two rare earth SOEs with the same line of thought, efficiency of scale, while taking small risk of reducing competition.