Visionary Self-Made Billionaire and Welfare Queen

The Streetwise Professor unloads on Elon Musk:

But my main issue with Musk was not about the stock price.  It was about the fact that all of his companies were heavily dependent on government subsidies and support.  This support socialized the potential losses, and allowed Musk (and other major investors, notably Goldman) to capture the upside.  My point was if his products and business models were so great, he could succeed on his own, by attracting private capital.....
SpaceX was  looking for a commercial launch site, and  seeking state subsidies in order to build it.  The company has been playing states off against one another, looking for tax benefits. My current home state, Texas, has been one of his targets.
Cynically, Musk focused on one of the poorest parts of the state-Brownsville-and dangled the prospect of a mere 600 jobs, in exchange for  $20 million dollars or so in tax benefits.  Some of which will come from the taxpayers of that very poor community.  And sadly, the state legislature has succumbed.....
The poorest people in Brownsville will not benefit the slightest from the SpaceX venture. But he and his lobbyist successfully importuned the state and county to take taxpayer money and give it to SpaceX by invoking their poverty. It was utterly cynical for a billionaire to extract tens of millions from Texas taxpayers in the name of the poor Mexican Americans of Brownsville.
I know this is the way the game is played. And that’s the problem: the game is cynical and wrong. It is mere rent seeking. Musk is particularly appalling because he is a rent seeker posing as a technological visionary. His businesses all depend on extracting rents from the government, which he pockets.
But he has a cult of personality that portrays him as some towering visionary genius.

Amen. If you scratch at the surface of many of our supposedly self-made elites, you'll find out they benefited enormously from public investment. But start talking about having a bit more of their fortune go toward investing in other people's potential and you'll usually hear a bunch of squealing. Taxpayer subsidies for corporations, especially when those businesses get states to bid against each other for a facility, are just handouts to shareholders, who are the people who least need government handouts. Agriculture subsidies are bad policy, but tax breaks for corporate expansion are ridiculous.