Guests of On With Kara Swisher tore into Elon Musk Monday for his flagrant double standards on state-funded programs given the eye-watering amounts his own companies have sucked up over the years.
Swisher was joined by economists Mariana Mazzucato, Paul Krugman and Oren Cass to discuss the pitfalls of “Trumponomics” when the topic came up on Monday’s edition of the podcast.
Addressing Mazzucato, the host said, “You said people like Elon Musk act like parasites because they wanna destroy the public investments that helped them build their companies.” Swisher added that by 2015, Tesla alone had already received almost $5bn from the state.
“I mean, more than a parasite, he should have even just said thank you,” Mazzucato said, further pointing out the problem of hypocrisy over government support went far beyond the SpaceX founder in applying to any number of other tech billionaires.
Cass was of much the same opinion. “[Musk] is, I think, literally humanity’s greatest subsidy farmer,” he said, adding that people taking advantage of state funding is normally a good thing unless they’re hellbent on “pulling the ladder up” after themselves.
Over the past ten years, Tesla and SpaceX are estimated to have benefited from upward of $20 billion worth of federal contracts—a figure that’s become even more keenly pronounced against Musk’s ongoing crusade against “government waste” as head of the DOGE temporary advisory committee.
Musk’s actions in that capacity also came under fire from Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Kruger on Monday. “If you look at what Elon Musk said about killing USAID, he didn’t say we think we have some discretion here, he said this agency is staffed by left wing Marxists who hate America,” as Kruger put it.
He added, “I defy you to find anything like that happening under a democratic administration.”
