Elon Musk Laid Off Supercharger Team After Taking $17 Million in Federal Charging Grants

lautan@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.world – 864 points – Elon Musk Laid Off Supercharger Team After Taking $17 Million in Federal Charging Grants
gizmodo.com

Despite its CEO railing against Biden, Tesla was more than happy to take the administration's money.

114

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

This is why I fucking hate government grants to corporations. These assholes never put in safeguards to actually force these jackass companies to actually use it as intended.

I'm OK with grants for certain things/times/whatever. But it seems like if the owner is worth billions and comes to the gov't for a handout, the gov't should just tax them correctly and say,"No you."

Infrastructure should be public anyways, so instead of giving grants to private for profit companies, it would instead use that money to just fund the infrastructure.

Government grants should come with government share % of the company.

Or at least with heavy requirements and obligations like every government "grant" for normals people.

Oh I think it’s all going how it was intended. Just not going according to the public justification.

Although I understand the sentiment, the instrument under which the funding has been granted is called NEVI and has pretty strict requirements about what gets built (150kW rated, payment terminal equipped charging stations along major roads) as well as transparency requirements about reliability.

Can they just not build them and keep the money though?

Looking at the several billion dollars that we gave the telecommunication companies over the last two decades for "nation wide high speed fiber infrastructure," I would say the answer is not only yes, but we will keep giving them more money for the same damn thing.