That's like saying the top VC firms are all inept because most of the startups they fund fail.
It has often been the role of our government to make risky bets in order to advance step-changes in our society's progress. Those bets have resulted in such things as spaceflight, modern telecommunications, lasers and the internet to name just a few.
If Tesla indeed transforms the world as they are poised to do, their success will far exceed the cumulative failures of Solyndra and the like.
Not to mention, Tesla's competition are subsidized in many ways, most of which are more subtle than the tax credits for alternative fuels that you allude to. Failure to price in the health and climate externalities of fossil fuels amounts to subsidy, as do the trillions of dollars spent on overseas entanglements to secure fossil fuel supplies.
I love it when people champion entities like Tesla benefiting from incentive structures when it's conveniently aligned with their personal beliefs about the superiority of the tech industry, their political agendas, and/or the idolzation of people like Musk, but forget that there's a far broader and more insidious reality here.
Reply to Below: Not libertarian. I believe strongly in government regulations where appropriate and that limiting our personal liberties in certain ways is essential to guaranteeing economic and physical security. I happen to agree with the sustainability agenda as well. I disagree with the mechanism being employed to advance it. USG should instead focus on taxing/penalizing for carbon emissions as a negative externality, which would have an ancillary benefit of making alternative energy companies overall more competitive. Asking the government to make decisions about structuring incentives, by contrast, is positively asinine (you get things like ethanol). Furthermore, I have a serious problem with the government deploying tax dollars to directly benefit corporations when there is no immediate and tangible return, regardless of the context.
But you're really just throwing around a bunch of innuendo and five-dollar words to suggest the incentive structure that Tesla (and all other automakers) have at their disposal is bogus. You've provided no evidence, and Occam's Razor offers a much more reasonable explanation: becoming energy independent and sustainable would be in our national interest in a massive way, and policymakers decided these incentives offer a reasonable risk / reward for accelerating that goal.
If you object on some philosophical / libertarian grounds then fine, I disagree with you but can understand where you're coming from. But don't throw around unsubstantiated claims of corruption and "insidious realities" and expect anyone to be sympathetic to your argument when you're not actually saying anything of substance.
Does Tesla price in the health and climate externalities of the lithium cycle and the reset of their raw materials?
These blanket statements are often wrong, there are really bad instances of a government trying to manipulate markets but there are also instances where it is needed to keep businesses in check.
I would rather live in the world as it is right now than in a Corporatocracy.
This sounds exactly like the free market to me. Hapless morons who don't know what they're doing—but try to reach their goals nonetheless—as far as the eye can see.
Edit: I feel like I have to clarify this everywhere perhaps because it's an unorthodox viewpoint: of course companies need to be regulated; I'm arguing against government-sponsored incentives and subsidies. Stick to making it more expensive to burn fossil fuels, thereby increasing receipts (use it to fund alternatives research, studies, etc similar to how Big Tobacco has to pay for anti-smoking ads) instead of less expensive to buy someone's product, at the cost of taxpayer dollars.
