My comment was that the US missed out on the opportunity to be the dominant financial beneficiary in this sector.
You didn’t say that, you just said “benefits” in general as though you were talking about all the benefits. I was just responding to what you wrote: that was my point.
Fine though, now I understand you were just talking about a part of the potential economic benefit of manufacturing those products. In the future, you could make these kinds of misunderstandings less likely by being more specific.
A rich guy has gotten involved - Elon Musk, who owns Solar City.
Is it your position Solar city 1) currently manufactures its own solar panels and 2) doing so is currently profitable and the business is thriving? Because as far as I can see it’s not even clear they’re still manufacturing solar panels. They had a deal with Panasonic but Panasonic exited a year or so ago, presumably because they couldn’t get enough of a compensation for their investment even with the subsidies. Even at that point, it seems like they were just assembling components at the most, they weren’t doing anything like fabricating the chips themselves.
“A New York State Comptroller’s audit found just 54 cents of economic benefit for every subsidy dollar spent on the factory, and external auditors have written down nearly all of New York’s investment. Most of the solar-panel manufacturing equipment bought by the state has been sold at a discount or scrapped.” — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_New_York
Regarding effects after Tesla acquired Solar City: “By 2019, Tesla’s solar panel market share was falling, prompting the company to cut its sales force. Revenue from Tesla’s energy generation and storage operations from January to September 2019 fell 7% from a year earlier to $1.1 billion.” — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarCity
My take away is Musk tried to milk as much as he could from the subsidies and generally for society the thing was a net value loss. That’s in line with my conception of how he operates.