As designed for large companies, government contracts or not. Look at the tax payments for any large company and you'll see minimal tax liabilities.

Nothing to do with the story but I always downvote links behind paywall or emailwall.

NYT honestly never paywalls me (I don't live in North America/EU), so I can't figure out if the article is free or not.

I usually add an archived version if I know there is a paywall (going to do that).

Socialize risks and losses, privatize profits.

All of Elon Musk's companies were created to siphon off public money.