Gavin Newsom recently stunned a public audience by outright claiming that California’s regulatory regime “created” Elon Musk and Tesla, a narrative he trotted out to take credit for the rise of one of America’s most consequential companies. The governor told audiences that without California’s rules and subsidies there “would be no Tesla,” a line that landed like a punchline for anyone who believes in private enterprise over political one-upmanship.
Newsom even leaned on numbers in his telling, insisting Tesla had been “a beneficiary of well over a billion dollars of subsidies,” and his office has estimated total California assistance at roughly $3.2 billion since 2009. That tidy figure is being waved around by politicians who think taxpayer dollars are interchangeable with the risk-taking, sleepless nights, and private capital that actually launched Tesla.
The governor pointed to California’s ZEV credit scheme as the secret sauce that rescued Tesla, citing the roughly $2.48 billion that Tesla allegedly earned by selling credits to legacy automakers. But let’s be blunt: regulatory credit systems shift obligations, they don’t manufacture innovation in garages and factories — entrepreneurs build companies, not bureaucracy.
If you want proof Elon Musk didn’t rise on a government throne, look at the company’s messy love-hate relationship with the state and Musk’s own decision to move Tesla’s headquarters to Texas, citing overregulation and overlitigation as core reasons to leave. That migration should tell any thinking American everything they need to know about whether the private sector bows to regulators or mere survival beats entitlement.
Conservatives should be furious when politicians hustle for credit after years of scorning the very innovators they now claim created. This isn’t humility — it’s political opportunism dressed up as humility, and it’s offensive to every risk-taking American who built something without asking Sacramento for permission.
Hardworking patriots understand the truth: bold entrepreneurs and investors shoulder the risk and shoulder the responsibility when they fail and when they win, while politicians too often claim the victory lap. If we want more Teslas and more breakthroughs, we should reward freedom, not hand out trays of crony favors and then take a bow.
