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that the right way to win on a cause is to argue the merits
of that cause,” Elon said. “This statement may surprise some
people, but my experience is that most (not all) politicians
and their staffs want to do the right thing and eventually
do.”^386
Elon’s favorite American president is Ronald Reagan,
who was the president between 1981 and 1989. “I think Rea-
gan was great,” Elon said. “Reagan was a smart man. The
big difference between President Bush [George W Bush]
and Reagan is that Reagan actually had strong intellectual
underpinnings for his decisive actions. He read. He read a
lot of books. He thought deeply about the subjects. And
particularly prior to the stroke, his writings were actually
quite smart.”^454
Because Elon believes in a small government, he was
criticized when Tesla accepted a loan from the government.
But back in 2008, we experienced the worst period since the
Great Depression in the 1920s. When a company requires
an enormous amount of capital, like a car company does,
then he argued it made sense to accept a loan from the
government.^340
What a government is good at is to fund basic research
- not rapid advancement of technology. “To have things
takeoff, you’ve got to have commercial companies do it,”
Elon said. “The government was good at getting the basics
of the Internet going, but it languished. Commercial com-
panies took a hand around 1995, and then it accelerated.”^316
Like the Internet, the US government funded the ba-
sic rocket research, and now can private companies, like