Elon Musk's fortune reached unprecedented heights recently when he became the first person to achieve trillionaire status, largely due to SpaceX's public market debut.

Meanwhile, €860 million in incentives for Tesla buyers enabled Germany to access EU Covid funds, and Musk's Berlin production site is set to receive more than €71 million in public assistance, per internal papers secured by EUobserver.

An EUobserver probe examined whether any portion of the EU's post-pandemic recovery resources flowed to Tesla operations in Germany, where Musk has endorsed the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany party and labeled the EU a civilizational danger, positions aligned with Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

During 2020 to 2023, close to €860 million in German incentives supported Tesla acquisitions across the country through an initiative that aided national efforts to secure EU Covid refinancing.

Germany used its electric vehicle incentive scheme to fulfill environmental benchmarks linked to its pandemic recovery package, meaning Tesla customers indirectly contributed to the requirements for releasing EU recovery resources to the federal authorities.

Nevertheless, Musk stated last December in an online outburst after violating EU digital regulations that the EU ought to be dissolved, likening its bodies to the Fourth Reich in reference to Nazi Germany over a €120 million penalty imposed on his platform X.

X serves as a platform for white supremacists, misogynists and hazardous conspiracy theories, according to the US-based Centre for Counterring Digital Hate, a nonprofit that has charged Musk with inciting violence in Belfast following a severe stabbing incident attributed to an asylum seeker.

He also notably indicated that Tesla advocates eliminating all subsidies, including those for oil and gas, after declining €1.14 billion in federal and Brandenburg regional support under the EU's IPCEI Batteries program in 2021 for a battery cell facility near Grünheide, roughly 30km from Berlin.

Yet the resources included first industrial deployment constraints that prompted Tesla to reject them, whereas the US provided substantial production-linked tax credits with fewer limitations.

For a firm such as Tesla, that approach is likely far more appealing, notes Lucas Carvalho at the Berlin-based Bertelsmann Stiftung, an independent foundation.

Companies typically favor tax benefits over direct grants since they provide more adaptability along with reduced administrative load or political oversight, he observed.

Despite Musk's earlier positions on such incentives, the Gigafactory is currently obtaining German public funds as it produces Model Y vehicles, while the buyer subsidies drove increased demand for his Tesla models.

Supporting Tesla's Grünheide Plant

Soon after his online Fourth Reich remarks, the German state of Brandenburg issued the initial of three €24 million payments to Tesla's Grünheide battery facility after receiving European Commission approval under a Ukraine-war crisis and transformation framework.

EUobserver research further shows that Germany qualifies for several hundred million euros as its proportional share of Covid-era refinancing for the incentives extended to Tesla owners from 2021 to 2023. This represents an illustrative projection drawn from data supplied by Germany's finance ministry.