Tesla CEO Elon Musk said it is “insane” that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) is reportedly excluding his electric vehicle company from California’s new tax rebate program.
On Monday, Newsom announced plans to offer tax credits for residents who purchase EVs should President-elect Donald Trump eliminate federal electric vehicle tax credits.
But Tesla, California’s largest EV manufacturer, could be left out of the plan because it includes market-share limitations that would exclude the massive electric vehicle company’s EV models, according to a Bloomberg report and confirmed by the governor’s office in comments to the Washington Examiner.
Musk decried the news that his company will likely be left out of Newsom’s EV credits proposal, saying the announcement came “even though Tesla is the only company who manufactures their EVs in California!”
“This is insane,” he continued in a post to X on Monday.
Even though Tesla is the only company who manufactures their EVs in California!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 25, 2024
This is insane. https://t.co/EhVeG2TYqT
There remains a possibility that the California legislature could amend Tesla’s omission from the credits. When pressed by the Washington Examiner on whether there had been any correspondence between Newsom and Musk on the announcement, the governor’s office declined to comment.
Musk has butted heads with California Democrats for years, as the tech mogul’s biggest companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, and X, were at one time headquartered in the Golden State.
Tesla was founded in California just over two decades ago. Musk became the company’s chairman and largest investor less than a year after its creation, rising to the position of CEO by 2008.
As the world’s largest EV manufacturer, Tesla hit a $1 trillion market value earlier this year. Musk pulled the company’s headquarters out of California in 2021.
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At the time, Musk cited the state’s strict COVID-19 safety protocol that mandated a Tesla factory in the San Francisco Bay Area be closed as the “final straw.” Calling California stay-at-home pandemic orders “fascist,” Musk argued they were “forcibly imprisoning people in their homes against all of their constitutional rights.”
Musk also pulled SpaceX and X out of California in July, citing opposition to a state law that banned teachers from letting parents know about children desiring to identify as a different gender.
The news came the same month that Musk mourned that the “woke mind virus” about transgender policy had figuratively “killed” one of his children. The Tesla CEO’s comments about Vivian Jenna Wilson, his transgender child who was born Xavier Musk, came during an interview with psychologist Jordan Peterson.
Newsom responded to Musk’s retreat from California by suggesting that he had “bent the knee” to Trump in a bid to gain favor for government subsidies. His words followed Musk’s decision to endorse the Republican presidential nominee in the wake of his first assassination attempt just days earlier.
Musk has since gained a prominent role in the next White House after Trump tapped him to head the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency.
Newsom, in turn, swiftly called for a special session of the state legislature to ensure that California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office would be adequately funded for legal challenges to the incoming Republican administration.
“We won’t sit idle,” Newsom said even as fiscal projections from the nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst’s Office indicated that the state does not have the financial capacity to wage costly lawsuits. “We are prepared to fight in the courts.”
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Whatever battles Newsom and the Trump administration get into, differences about how to handle EV subsidies are likely here to stay. As a top adviser to the president-elect, Musk has backed Trump’s tentative plans to scrap the federal $7,500 subsidy for people who buy EVs, a move the California Democrat staunchly opposes.
Meanwhile, the number of people who reported owning an electric vehicle has nearly doubled since 2023, per an April Gallup poll. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory projected this year that, by 2030, there will be 33 million EVs on the road.