Obama used loan guarantees and grants, not equity stakes.
Solyndra $500M loan guarantee (defaulted 2011)
Tesla $500M loan (repaid early 2013 with interest)
First Solar $3B loan guarantees (currently being serviced)
SunPower $1.2B loan guarantee (bankrupt 2024 but loan repaid)
ARRA (2009) $25.6B grants disbursed
No equity positions taken. Trump's policy is direct equity stakes as condition for industrial subsidies/tariff relief. It's statist, but I wouldn't call it communist.
Come come now. Elon has built Tesla on something closer to $38bn of taxpayer largesse/avoidance according to the Washington Post.0 I doubt many people would fail to create public entities with healthy casino ponzi stock trading if they had umpteen billion $ of govt funny money propping them up. Hell they might even start a rocket business as a sideline...
A lot of the things the administration is doing seem a bit socialist because socialism has some overlap with populism. The main difference is that it is framed as Trump doing favours to certain groups of people, with expectation of reciprocity or at least personal gratitude and loyalty, instead of more institutional wealth redistribution or subsidy policies.
Depending on who he is doing favours to, it looks right-wing or left-wing under the traditional political lens, but it's more about Trump doing whatever he wants with the governments resources.
