SolarCity’s $8 Billion Turns Out To Be Just $1.1 Billion

When Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) announced in June it would buy SolarCity (NASDAQ: SCTY), I got really excited. For months, I’d been studying SolarCity’s financials and I had been stunned by the many misrepresentations of its value in the company’s publications.

Preparing the merger, I thought, would make a lot of 3rd parties take a closer look, so we would finally get a true picture of what the highest paid Bay Area executive under 40 had been achieving so far.

Unfortunately, the 3rd parties brought to the table by Tesla and SolarCity did not offer a lot of joy. They stuck to the numbers given to them by the people who paid them, so the story of deception just continued.

In fact, smooth sailing made executives of Tesla even more courageous, because on October 25, they showed the following graph in a presentation given to Institutional Shareholder Services Inc.

Solarcity Earnings Heading Quietly Into The Sunset

SolarCity’s Wednesday started with a bang and ended with a whisper.

At the end of a day many Americans spent adjusting to the election of Donald Trump as president, SolarCity Corp. reported its third-quarter results. Despite these being potentially the last ever set of numbers as a public company, they were even more downplayed than usual, with no accompanying analyst call.

This might seem strange, given shareholders are due to vote in about a week on whether to approve the company’s merger with Tesla Motors Inc. and that Trump’s elevation is widely seen as a yuge risk to the incentives underpinning the solar leasing business (the stock dropped 4 percent on the day). Bear in mind, though, that last week’s Q&A with the management of the two companies wasn’t the most convincing sales pitch. On that basis, maybe it was best to let the figures speak for themselves.

Not that they were entirely convincing. The first thing to note was the cut to guidance on installations, something SolarCity has now done in all three of this year’s quarterly updates.

Elon Musk Critic Sues Tesla, Says Musk’s ‘Agents’ Hacked His Twitter

In a bizarre series of events, a former employee of an energy sector services company has claimed that staff or “agents” from the car manufacturer Tesla hacked his Twitter account.

The complaint, reported by The Daily Kanban, is written by attorneys representing one Todd A. Katz, and oil executive, and comes after Tesla filed its own lawsuit against Katz, claiming he impersonated Telsa’s CEO Elon Musk in an email.

According to the complaint, Katz runs a Twitter account with the username “@ValuationMattrs,” which he’s used to criticize Musk and Tesla for various things, including the company’s planned merger with SolarCity Corporation, Musk’s solar energy company. Indeed, much of the document rants about Musk’s business decisions, before actually getting into any sort of formal allegation.

But on August 4, the day after Katz allegedly sent an email to Tesla CFO Jason Wheeler while purporting to be Musk, “Tesla and its agents, on information and belief, accessed Katz’s Twitter account, @ValuationMattrs, without authorization from Katz,” the complaint reads.

At 3:25 PM, a person logged into this account from an IP address used by the two Best Buy electronic stores closest to Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, which are around seven and 11 miles away respectively, according to the complaint.

As the complaint points out, both of these stores allow potential customers to handle and try out various electronic devices, including Apple iPhones, with an internet connection.

Elon Musk unveils Mars colonization plan, but don’t pack your bags just yet

Elon Musk wants to save humanity. That’s his stated mission. He doesn’t want to get rich for its own sake, he wants to get rich so that he can devote his wealth to the colonization of Mars, which in Musk’s mind is not only an enticing place to live but also an effective backup location […]

Elon Musk And Friends Are Spending Millions To Break Out Of The Matrix

Fans of the Wachowskis’ The Matrix films may remember the trilogy’s final suggestion (as far as critics could tell) that humanity’s struggle to escape its own virtual world may take a very, very long time. Thankfully, a number of tech titans are dedicating millions to finding a way out of the techno-reality they’re creating.

Elon Musk and at least one other future-facing donor are reportedly spending millions to establish escape routes from the indistinguishably realistic and Matrix-like virtual world that awaits us all–or which, according to Musk, may have already arrived. The UK’s Independent noted yesterday that new information from Sam Altman, who heads up the powerful Y Combinator and founded the non-profit OpenAI with Musk, suggests that Musk isn’t the only one pouring cash into a virtual contingency plan.

As a recent New Yorker profile of Altman explains, “people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer.” As a result, a second “tech billionaire” is now putting their money where their (hopefully real) mouth is by paying scientists to find the simulation’s emergency exit.

Elon Musk makes cryptic comments about Tesla competing with Uber

Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested Wednesday that he can create a car-sharing network that’s so good, customers will abandon Uber and other ride-sharing companies in droves to adopt it.

During an earnings call Wednesday, Musk was asked to explain whether his proposed car sharing network, dubbed the Tesla Network, would generate revenue for Tesla or help Tesla owners offset the costs of their vehicles. In response, Musk made some cryptic comments about the scope of his so-called “Tesla Network.”

Musk said people have been characterizing his car-sharing proposal as “Tesla versus Uber or Lyft or something like that. It’s not Tesla versus Uber, it’s the people versus Uber.” There was no follow-up question, so Musk’s statement was left hanging like that.

Coal Miner’s CEO Calls Tesla a ‘Fraud’ and Elon Musk Tweets It

For its part, Tesla was downgraded to neutral from a buy rating by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. last week. The company’s shares have dropped as it moves forward with its plan to buy rooftop solar installer SolarCity Corp., which some analysts have deemed a risky bet. Musk is chairman of SolarCity, and his cousin Lyndon Rive serves as its chief executive officer.

Customers who purchase an electric vehicle can claim a $7,500 federal income tax credit and several states offer additional incentives, according to Tesla’s website.

Tesla will let Musk’s tweet “stand as a comment,” spokeswoman Alexis Georgeson said in an e-mail. The Clinton campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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