Well I guess judging by the poster's rage, they should have got a better return and folded that into another project. I'm just trying to empathise with the anger of taking risks with relatively low returns using public money.

AFAIC Tesla upheld their end of the bargain and society is up by quite a bit. This is in stark contrast to other bullshit that the US government has funded which is wasteful at best. War, war on drugs, war on privacy, bankers, ...