A conservative group is targeting Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of luxury electric carmaker Tesla, by launching a lobbying campaign aimed at divesting Musk’s clean energy “empire” of all federal subsidies.
The group Citizens for the Republic, a conservative grassroots organization that espouses the ideals of former President Ronald Reagan, accuses Musk’s companies, including SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX, of receiving well over $5 billion in taxpayer support.
The grouped launched the campaign a few days before Tesla shareholders on Thursday decided to merge the carmaker with the solar panel firm SolarCity. Musk said the deal would make Tesla dealers a one-stop shop for low-emission transportation and clean electric power and battery storage.
“The Musk empire appears to be nothing more than a collection of failing startups and plummeting stock options,” the group said in a statement. “Even the once-touted SolarCity had to be bought out by Tesla” to survive, it added.
One day after the Tesla-SolarCity deal, the White House held a summit in Baltimore to create new inroads at universities and black colleges to make solar panels more cost effective for low-income households. But the conservative group hopes these types of initiatives will change under a Trump administration, along with the government picking winners and losers through tax credits and subsidies.
“Following the victory of President-elect Donald Trump and a majority of Republicans in the House and Senate, government corruption and spending abuse at all levels must end,” the group said in a statement announcing its anti-Musk campaign, which will begin by targeting federal solar subsidies.
“We will undertake a major campaign to StopElonFromFailingAgain.
She said they will specifically target the Investment Tax Credit for solar panels that Congress extended last December for five years.
“The people rejected the backroom deals and Washington special interests” with the election of Trump, Banister said. “Solar subsidies should be the first to go. No federal funds should be used to prop up failing companies like SolarCity.”
“With the unprecedented size of our national debt, a ballooning deficit, and crumbling infrastructure, the last place taxpayer funds should go is into the pockets of people like Elon Musk,” said Craig Shirley, Honorary Chairman of Citizens for the Republic.
Coal magnate Bob Murray, the head of Ohio-based Murray Energy and a vocal Trump supporter, sparred with Musk last month, saying Tesla is a “fraud” because of the subsidies it received from the government.
Tesla has “gotten $2 billion from the taxpayer, [and] has not made a penny yet in cash flow,” Murray said in an interview on CNBC.
Musk fired back on Twitter, saying the “real fraud” in energy “is denial of climate science. As for ‘subsidies,’ Tesla gets pennies on dollar vs coal. How about we both go to zero?”
Meanwhile, there is growing support for a Change.org petition to have Musk sit down with Trump explain the science behind the cause of global warming. Over 7,500 people have thus far signed the petition, the online Inverse magazine reported this week.
