Green scheme via US taxpayer-Tesla, the Electric Car guy who was going to save Toyota in Northern Calif....is broke

• Tesla was propped up by US taxpayer dollars because he seemed to be "green" (electric cars). Money was taken from hard working US taxpayers and transferred to a green schemer who is now broke and has already dipped into the money we gave him. Not exactly the joyous sign of business 'recovery' we were told about.
  

5/27/10: "Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk seems to have it all. The electric-car entrepreneur is the toast of Silicon Valley, Sacramento, and Tokyo

• after unveiling a plan to revive Toyota’s shuttered NUMMI plant last week. And deal-hungry Wall Street bankers are angling to take his company public. He’s even a Hollywood star,
  
• with a cameo in the hit Iron Man 2 movie, said to be based on his life story.

The one thing he doesn’t have, by his own admission,

• is money.

“About four months ago, I ran out of cash,” he wrote in a court filing dated Feb. 23, reviewed by VentureBeat. That’s a problem not just for him but for Tesla, where he is the lead investor and chief product architect, as well as CEO. Musk’s willingness to funnel his own cash into Tesla has for years sustained the faith of fellow investors and reassured would-be car buyers in 2008 when the company’s finances were in perilous shape.

• According to the filing — part of his pending divorce case from sci-fi novelist Justine Musk — Elon Musk
  

• has been living off personal loans from friends since October 2009 and spending $200,000 a month while making far less.
  
• Musk confirmed this in an interview with VentureBeat.

Tesla, likewise, is dealing with its cash flow problems by borrowing money from a friendly source —

• the United States government,
  

• which has eagerly backed cleantech startups through a Department of Energy loan program.
  

Tesla burned through $37 million in cash in the last three months of 2009, according to amended S-1 documents, filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission in preparation for its IPO. Tesla slowed this burn rate in the first quarter of 2010 to $8.4 million, but only by drawing down part of a

• $465 million loan from the DOE, while reporting a net loss of $29.5 million.
  

Tesla’s sales were flat year-over-year in the first quarter, but declined precipitously in the U.S., according to a former Tesla executive."...

• from Venturebeat.com, "Tesla's Elon Musk, 'I ran out of cash'", via Tom Nelson