“When the history of Tesla is written, the acquisition of SolarCity will be seen as the moment where the narrative took a decisive turn”
night last March in Buffalo, and Dennis Scott was sitting at home. A stocky veteran with salt-and-pepper hair and a close-cropped beard, Scott had been laid off from Tesla’s factory in Buffalo two months earlier as part of a global reduction in the company’s workforce. Since then, he had taken to sending Elon Musk emails and point-blank tweets, describing the pain the layoffs were causing.
Musk’s responses left Scott unimpressed. “Musk is a nice guy when you talk to him,” he says. “But I think he’s full of shit. He’ll tell you whatever you want to hear.” The controversy over SolarCity, which has dovetailed with questions about Musk’s mountain of debt and profit shortfalls, offers a window into the mind-set of America’s most outlandish and unpredictable CEO. Musk’s believers argue that the details of his ventures don’t matter: It’s the grand vision that counts. “The guy has a will to make stuff happen that is extraordinary,” says someone who worked closely with Musk. “He willed Tesla to happen.
On the consumer side, SolarCity was plagued by complaints about misleading sales tactics and shoddy installations. As the problems mounted, some workers began to feel manipulated by the company’s talk about being a force for good in the world. “I turned a blind eye to a lot of the silliness because of the idealism,” says one former senior employee. “I don’t know when the Rubicon was crossed, but there were micro-crossings every day.
“It was sold as a perfect marriage,” says the former senior employee. “The area around the factory is terrible, and I remember thinking: Wow, we are going to save the town where steel was made.” Cuomo too was hooked. “He was enchanted with the idea of Elon Musk in Buffalo,” says a longtime lobbyist in Albany. “I think he actually thought Musk was the next Dalai Lama.”who looked closely, the cracks at SolarCity were becoming apparent. In 2014, key executives had started to leave.
At the time, Musk was still a heroic figure to many. As former Tesla board member Nancy Pfund once said, “He’s always been a master of the universe in my mind.” Even Tesla skeptics admit that the Model S, which was launched in 2012, will go down in history as an absolute classic, followed by the equally celebrated Model X in 2015.
had flown to Los Angeles for Musk’s presentation. Afterward, he asked an engineer for the company if the tiles Musk had pointed to were real. “Oh no,” the engineer replied. “These are dummies. We just popped them up here to show you.” Robinson wasn’t outraged—it made sense that Musk would show a prototype—but he took note of the contrast between the rhetoric and the reality. “They made it sound like they had figured out how to get it to work,” he says.
Another #TSLAQ member, a Yale-trained lawyer and investment manager named Lawrence Fossi, made a discovery while combing through SolarCity’s financial statements. Without fanfare—and with no input from constituents—state officials had quietly issued a series of 10 amendments that watered down the requirements SolarCity must meet in exchange for the $1 lease on the Buffalo factory.
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