John Cornyn: “I have spoken before about my constituent, my fellow Texan, Elon Musk here on the floor and recounted the fact that it…”

“I have spoken before about my constituent, my fellow Texan, Elon Musk here on the floor and recounted the fact that it was really, maybe, probably--at least 15 years ago, maybe a little longer, when he came to my office here in Washington, DC, and said he had a new company called SpaceX, and he wanted to compete for the business of NASA and commercial space. And as it turned out, Mr. Musk had to sue the U.S. Government just for the privilege of competing with the United Space Alliance, I believe it is called, the existing entity that had an exclusive contract on space flight with the U.S. Government. I read recently that now SpaceX carries about 90 percent of the payloads in the world into space. It is a remarkable testament to not only his incredible innovation but resilience and persistence to build such a successful company. And that is not the only one he has built. Tesla is headquartered in Texas. I have been out to the Gigafactory right outside of Austin, TX, and he is building cars that are very popular and employing an awful lot of Texans--which I am all in favor of--and they continue to grow and hire more of my constituents. Mr. Musk has done something here in Washington, DC, in the last couple of months which is heresy; it is heresy. He has actually said the Federal Government spends too much, and he said a lot of what the Federal Government spends is waste and fraud and abuse.…”