(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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Tesla Wouldn’t Be Tesla Without Stimulus Spending [1]
['Brian Eckhouse']
Date: 2020-06-09
About a month after Barack Obama won the presidency, a cash-strapped Elon Musk made it clear that Tesla Inc.—then a boutique maker of a $109,000 sports car—would have to delay the rollout of a less expensive electric sedan unless it got government support. It was the middle of what was then the worst American financial collapse since the Great Depression, and the markets had just taken too much of a beating. “We can’t move forward with that without a major amount of capital,” the chief executive officer said Bloomberg Terminal in an interview in December 2008.
Musk’s plea was well-timed: The incoming president was keen to use part of the approximately $800 billion stimulus package his team was preparing to create a new green energy economy. One year after Obama took office, Tesla got a $465 million federal loan to design electric vehicles and build them at a manufacturing plant in Fremont, Calif. The company went public shortly thereafter, repaid the loan early, mainstreamed the electric vehicle, and now employs about 20,000 people in the Bay Area alone. It has the second-largest market capitalization of any automaker worldwide.
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[1] Url:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/tesla-got-a-major-boost-from-2009-u-s-stimulus
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