Scott Woolley should have concluded Tesla is the most incredible success in recent American history creating thousands of well paying jobs with billions paid in indirect taxes from the employee salary, sold cars, private contractors and all the shareholders paying taxes through stock sold, including Musk.I remember reading the article you attached back in 2013. Based on the enormous success of Tesla, I would not be surprised if MoneyBox and Scott Woolley come out with new article claming the US government bungled investment in Tesla cost taxpayers more than $90B. The original title and sub title are screen captioned below (following text is mine).
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The above title and sub title are fraught with injustice.
In 2009 the U.S. Dept. of Energy lent Tesla $465M. Tesla paid back the loan early, with interest, and early payment penalty. Tesla went on to become enormously successful employing 100,000 tax payer jobs, the vast majority in the US, create a world wide EV charging infrastructure and single handedly turned the tide from ICE to BEV helping save our precious planet.
In 2009 the U.S. Dept. of Energy lent Solyndra $528M. They achieved nothing, went bankrupt, and defaulted on their loan shortly thereafter paying not a single cent back to the government.
Yet MoneyBox's Scott Woolley clearly stated that Tesla's result to the US government is twice as worse as that on Solyndra. As the article was written back in 2013 when Tesla was valued a $12B market cap, with that reasoning their Tesla investment is now 180X worse than that spent of Solyndra.
Yes, I get the point the author is trying to make, that US Goverment may have included some form of ownership of the company (in shares) to take on the high risk. However if these conditions were in place, perhaps Tesla would have sought money elsewhere from venture capitalists or others to keep it alive, so this is a mute point. But to compare and state Tesla is worse than Solyndra, and therefore Solyndra is better than Tesla, is a travesty of common sense.
Very glad that Tesla is not taking on the loan offered from Germany. Great move.
Sad article to read.