Tesla’s Elon Musk vs Coal CEO: let’s all drop subsidies to zero

Tesla has taken flack from the CEO of Murray Energy Corporation, Robert Murray, who claimed that it is taking far too much in taxpayer subsidies, while failing to turn a large profit to counter it. Tesla founder Elon Musk has fired back, saying it's nothing compared to the coal industry, but would rather see neither of them with subsidies.

“Tesla is a fraud,” said Murray when asked about the electric car maker. “He's gotten two billion dollars from the tax payer and hasn't made a penny yet […] Here again it's subsidies.”

He went on to claim that Hilary Clinton had plans to support her “friends,” like Elon Musk and that the talk of battling climate change was nothing more than a message of support for some of the richest people in America.

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Musk didn't take these statements lying down however and along with tweeting out a link to the video in question, he said that the real fraud was denying climate change, something that Murray has made a particular goal of his in the past decade. Indeed at the end of the interview above, he said:

“You could close down every coal mining place in the U.S. today and you would not effect the temperature of the planet at all.”

Real fraud going on is denial of climate science. As for "subsidies", Tesla gets pennies on dollar vs coal. How about we both go to zero?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 10, 2016

Murray is sometimes called the King of Coal, as his is one of the few companies which continues to invest in the dirty energy solution, is still buying up mines and champions it as a cost effective option.

Musk however pointed out that coal and other fossil fuels were only as cheap as they were because of much greater subsidies given to those industries. Here in the UK, despite a previous pledge to phase out those subsidies, when David Cameron was prime minister, he increased them, granting close to £6 billion to coal, gas and oil industries.

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KitGuru Says: Watching Murray talk about coal as some sort of great industry, is like a scene from Thank You For Smoking. It's crazy talk. 

Image source: Wikimedia

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