Failure

Tesla Is Worse Than Solyndra

Yet despite all the public celebration, both Solyndra and Tesla stand as warnings of the dangers in deputizing bureaucrats to play bankers and venture capitalists. In both loans, the government walked away laughably undercompensated for the risk it accepted in the startup companies. In fact, the Tesla deal was arguably far more costly for America than the Solyndra fiasco.
Solyndra exposed the first way the taxpayer could lose out. The traditional advantage of making a loan (as opposed to buying stock in a company) is that lenders often get paid something even when the borrowing company fails, because they hold collateral. Solyndra’s bankruptcy revealed the ephemeral value of the government’s collateral. Taxpayers have yet to recover a penny from the company.

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Tesla has faster cars, but we were promised Jetpacks

The problem for Tesla, and anyone who bid up its stock Tuesday afternoon, is that it has already pushed investors’ horizons out so far, in the interest of raising more capital, that even going beyond “ludicrous speed” on its flagship car doesn’t get pulses racing. If your CEO has spent months and months talking about a new mass-market vehicle, home batteries, buying SolarCity, electric trucks and robo-taxis, then cutting that zero-to-60 lag by 3 tenths of a second seems rather humdrum.

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Feds approve $2.6 billion Tesla-SolarCity merger, but stock market says ‘meh’

Meanwhile, SolarCity plans to offer integrated power-generating roofs in addition to the solar-power panels it has been installing on existing structures.

Neither company has yet become fully profitable, and the share prices for both companies trended downward in today’s trading. This week, Musk and other SolarCity executives reported that they purchased tens of millions of dollars worth of bonds issued by the company – a move that CNBC said stirred concerns among some industry observers.

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DNC Energy Platform Long on Commands, Short on Hope

The most important sentence on energy in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) platform document is the one it took out: this version of the platform no longer supports an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy.

Coal is out. Nuclear energy and hydropower aren’t even mentioned once in the platform. This version seeks to pick winners and losers in the energy space and remake the energy mix the way the DNC platform committee sees fit, regardless of what the market wants.

You know why that’s a bad idea? Because just about every time the government tries to pick winners and losers in the energy space, the government gets it wrong—like really, really wrong.

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