Mr. Musk, fighting back on Twitter, wrote of Mr. Murray, a Republican who doesn’t believe human activity is affecting the climate: “Real fraud going on is denial of climate science. As for ‘subsidies’, Tesla gets pennies on dollar vs coal. How about we both go to zero?”

There is some evidence that the president-elect will be flexible on the issues Mr. Musk champions. On Monday, Mr. Trump met with former Vice President Al Gore, whose name is synonymous with the effort to fight global warming, and Mr. Gore told reporters that the session had been “lengthy and very productive.” And in an interview at The New York Times on Nov. 22, Mr. Trump said he would keep an open mind on the subject.

To Mr. Musk’s critics, he and the subsidies that have been offered to companies like his — mostly in the form of federal clean-energy tax credits and rebates — represent the “swamp” that Mr. Trump says he wants to “drain.”

Separately, Jim Chanos, the investor who has bet against the price of Tesla’s shares, called Mr. Musk’s merger of Tesla and SolarCity, both of which he controlled, a “shameful example of corporate governance at its worst.” Some analysts denounced Mr. Musk as a “corporate governmental mess” and others have called him a huckster.

Indeed, while Mr. Musk gets painted as a beneficiary of crony capitalism and the Obama administration’s efforts to promote green energy, he is — perhaps counterintuitively — a prime example of everything we want our business leaders to be.

What other chief executive do you know who takes only $1 a year in salary and has never sold a share of Tesla except to pay taxes? Yes, he pays taxes — to the tune of some $600 million in just the past year. He has about as much skin in the game as any C.E.O. in the country. (If you’re asking how he pays to live, he has taken out a series of loans from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, using his shares as collateral. For some, that raises its own corporate governance concerns. However, the loans represent only about 5 percent of his net worth, so unless shares of Tesla fall precipitously, he should be able to cover the loan amounts.)