this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Well the contract he signed for ~$1 trillion by 2035 specifies he has to deploy 1 million robots and 1 million robo-taxis. Which I can see happening.
The issue I see with it is he has to get Tesla car deliveries up to 20 million a year. To put that into perspective, new car sales in the U.S. has never hit 20 million vehicles that I know of. Globally I just saw their sales were at less than 2 million.
So chopping the $80,000+ models and keeping the ~$40,000 models that make up 97% of their sales makes sense. He needs something that will gather a lot of new sales, and there aren't mass amounts of people with $100k to buy a new car.
My bet is on him selling cars to himself somehow
Nah, he'll have the government buy them as fleet cars.
SpaceX are 'buying' all the Cyber Trucks no-one wants.
Weren't local police departments looking at the cyber truck, ran trials, and said lol, no thanks
At least they ran trials. I feel the federal gov't would just buy the shit with our taxes.
The federal government is essentially buying them up when space x does it. Since that’s where space x gets most of its money.
That's like saying your employer is buying your car because you get paid by your employer so your company is bankrolling Ford or whatever.
SpaceX bids on services the government wants people to provide, they win the bid (usually lowest cost due to their reusable rockets) and deliver said product/outcome. They don't even operate on cost plus contracts like other space companies, it's generally fixed cost.
This isn't like Tesla where there's things like ZEV credits or $7500 federal rebates.
This is I want to buy something and SpaceX delivers it, and of what they get from the government, that is the vast vast majority of it.
Also Starlink is now their biggest revenue generator (of which their are government purchases as well)
SpaceX also gets subsidies and tax credits. That’s different from contracts, and it’s our money. It they need credits and subsidies, they sure as fuck don’t need a parking lots full of unused and unsellable cyber trucks.
Every business gets tax credits, and tax credits are not government money being paid to SpaceX. It just means they pay less taxes. You as a individual get them too. That's money the government never had. For businesses its also usually somethings like if you build your business here you don't pay property taxes for X years. It wasn't anything like the EV rebate which was designed to prop up an industry.
They have received very little money that isn't for services delivered. It's not 0, but it's very little.
One could have argued they almost got a billion dollars for the rural broadband grant but that was revoked and they never got it. That would have been a we'll give you money to help launch rockets and lower your prices for our residents, had it happened.
Edit: there's very little reason to be upset with SpaceX in something like this. They've saved the government billions and billions of dollars by existing now. Tesla sure, they were given a lot of money for nothing in return, or programs were designed that forced other companies to give them money, but you're barking up the wrong tree with SpaceX.
Edit: This website says they received 6 grants, some training reimbursements, and some loans which probably had good repayment terms. https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-exploration-technologies-spacex And while some of those are undisclosed, it's not like McLennan County is giving them a billion dollars.
That already happened.
Good point ($1 million x $100,000 for cars)+($1 million x 500,000 for robots) is still less than a trillion $.
No?
His pay schedule amounted to $1trillion, not that he was going to make Tesla 1trillion.
It’s all to pump up his compensation
My maths must be wrong but my point was:
It appears that his pay schedule is so high that he could simply buy the cars/robots required to meet his performance targets.
Maybe I'm not making sense because none of this makes sense.