Clickbait title.

First, this is narrowly about federal income tax. SpaceX presumably pays plenty of other taxes.

Second, using the projected profits in the article, SpaceX will have exhausted its NOL pool by the end of this year, and so will pay billions in federal income tax next year.

But more important: the whole point of these tax cuts and programs is to let businesses use losses today so they can create value — and tax revenue — tomorrow. Of course, if you take a snapshot after part 1 but before part 2, it will always look like “X gets Y from government and gives nothing back”.

Is the author arguing that corporations should not be able to carry forward net operating losses? Or that this one specific company shouldn't be allowed to?

NYT thinks I'm a robot, so I can't read the article, but in general startups running at a loss don't pay taxes until they've generated a return on their investment, so this isn't at all unusual and wouldn't be surprising.

The government gets billions back in savings from SpaceX.

No company pays taxes if they are in loss.

I guess they forgot the time we paid $100k+/person to get to the ISS? 90% space payload goes through SpaceX and that is the biggest national security boost that frankly, NASA or the US govt could've never achieved.

Mars was always a smokescreen for SpaceX's strategic goals in the military industrial complex. Just read the bio of Elon's buddy, Michael D. Griffin. Dark stuff that explains Elon's otherwise inexplicable trajectory over the last decade.