The $200 million in north carolina is a discount on future taxes for when they start production. - seems a little unfair to count it against the company when they haven't even started production yet.

And the total amount of private funding raised to date is $700 million - so maybe 10% of funding to date is from the government? Seems like a good deal for the government?

Some portion of it is indeed a discount on future taxes - but a huge chunk isn't, whether it's direct grants, infra/hanger upgrades at the airport, a bunch of the subsidies are government spending to make the facility more useful for Boom.

It's not even that I'm opposed to that kind of spending, I'm a big believer in government support to bootstrap new industries! But the conceit that they're doing this without any government support should be disregarded. I'm only partially being pedantic on this because the CEO of the company in question is definitely not a proponent of that type of spending.

It's like when some of those other Thiel-adjacent goofballs kept tweeting things like "taxation is theft!" while ignoring that every one of their companies had multi-million dollar government contracts.

I think these types of arguments are somewhat disingenuous when it's referring to tax breaks on future taxes. It doesn't harm the state at all because the company wouldn't have located in the state in the first place without it. It just acts to remove the drag on the company being successful. If they're successful then the amount of tax revenue the state will get will be tremendous. So there's no downsides.

And it also doesn't immediately act as funding or tax dollars for the company.

Just talking about the "$200M" number.

Over half of the $200M is infrastructure upgrades to attract the new company as well.. so those are hard dollars spent in advance of a single new employee or anything positive for the state. It may end up being a good investment, but if you ask the voters, "Do you want to spend $100M in taxpayer money to get the airport facilities ready for a startup backed by the richest people on earth?" they might ask why those people don't just pay for the upgrades..

> "In addition, the state set aside in the state budget (via HB 334) $106.7 million for the site and roads improvement and for constructing hangers at the project site. "