The problem is when tax breaks become endemic. The market doing fine at supplying commercial jetliners and Boeing is very profitable, so why is the Sate of Washington and the Federal Government subsidizing them through the tax code? It comes down to the lobbying clout of Boeing rather than the interests of the tax payer. The same applies to the oil and gas industry and a hundred other tax breaks.

SpaceX is a great company and, given their launch successes and backlog, on the verge of becoming a commercial success. This doesn’t seem like the time and place to be creating yet another industry specific tax break.

Stinks, stinks, stinks, of Spacex’ competition guiding the WSJ’s hand. Overpricing on a monopoly leaves a lot of tax dollars leftover to hire writers and buy papers (with huge ad purchases) to defend that monopoly.

Wait till the DoD starts seriously considering SpaceX and then watch the “oh so unfair” editorials; writers need work too!

If you want engineers who are actually designing and building new rocket engines in the US (new as in really new) – who is doing that exactly?

Or is outsourcing to Russia the non-sinister option?

SpaceX hires a combination of aerospace old timers – the frustrated ones like Tome Mueller who was so annoyed that he could get to actually build rocket engines at TRW that he did it at home – and the sharpest grads they can find.

That pool simply isn’t available in Texas.

A strange comment. Elon is famously the guy who realizes that productivity, not labor costs are important. That is why he puts a very, very high percentage of his manufacturing on-shore in the US – using smaller numbers of workers, paid well, in conjunction with the latest automation and manufacturing technology.

Note that the Chinese space program guys specifically say that they can’t match his prices.

In fact, as time goes on, he is bringing more and more on shore – hence the $5 billion battery factory for Tesla.

Interestingly, a great deal of the anger over the loan to Tesla was that it stopped a sweet deal for the Wall Street crowd. Their plan was to lend Arab oil money to Tesla (the only available liquidity at the bottom of the crash) to Tesla at very high rates of interest, to apparently help them. Using the crippling debt burden, they would leverage control of the company and “correct the mistakes in it’s operations”. That is, shut down the US manufacturing, and sell the technology to existing car manufacturers.