The Walton family collectively is worth over $150 billion, it’s not surprising they have exposure to a solar company somewhere in their vast fortune. If you’re implying that this lawsuit has no merit because of that investment that seems like an incredibly shaky accusation.

It's a little curious they wouldn't choose to buy panels from a company they own.... don't you think?

First Solar has acted as an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firm for large ground-mounted solar farms, but they have never been in the rooftop solar installation business like SolarCity.

First Solar's panels would also be an unusual choice for a rooftop installation even if a different installer handled the work. Rooftop solar installations typically call for high efficiency panels. First Solar makes lower efficiency, lower cost panels that maintain performance at elevated temperatures. Their panels are good for solar farms, particularly in hot climates. They don't have anything special to recommend their use in rooftop projects.

except catching any CdTe runoff in gutter traps

Blatant nepotism and self dealing might be normal at WeWork and Tesla but some companies do have better corporate governance.

Yeah Walmart is really a bastion of moral integrity in corporate America

Compared to your average SV outfit like Tesla? It most likely is.

You said, with zero evidence to back it up. Unsubstantiated anti-Musk astroturfing is really tired and boring

Evidence of what? Of Saint Elon calling people pedophiles because they laughed at his harebrained ideas? Of Teslaclaiming to have the world's safest vehicles when between Musk's marketing and serious product deficiencies they quite literally kill people? Of and Musk personally being regularly found making fraudulent statements? And so on and so forth. I didn't realize than I need to provide backing evidence that water is wet. But Tesla's PR troll brigade would just say that it is the shorts' conspiracy anyway, because Saint Elon says water is solid, and so it is.

Examples of where it’s not, in comparison to other similar companies?

Walmart’s “controversy and criticism” section on Wikipedia links to its own page (which I’ve never seen before): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart

> Criticisms include charges of racial and gender discrimination,[1][2][3] foreign product sourcing, treatment of product suppliers, environmental practices,[4] the use of public subsidies, and the company's spying on its employees.[5]

Despite having a high average quality, wikipedia is a very dangerous source for anything controversial. And in particular, using the existence of a criticism page to infer anything at all is ill-advised.

Many SV companies, and certainly tons of corporate America are subject to the same (or worse) criticisms.

Not at all. Obviously more to it but these are the 2 main reasons I see;

1) Walmart would have a procurement department. These guys probaly have no idea of the likely 1000's of investment companies the Walton family own.

2) As a listed company, Walmart procurement would contact jobs like this to the best offer, not to seperate companies that happen to be owned by shareholders.

Honestly not really.

seems unlikely that the issue would've risen to the level of walmart's board, so they might not have even heard about.

Isn't the largest shareholder Vanguard, by far? My impression based on a cursory Googling is that Vanguard has about 130 million shares, whereas the largest individual shareholder, Jim Walton, only has about 10 million.

In fact all of the top 10 shareholders of Walmart have more shares (>10M) than any of the Waltons, it appears:

The Vanguard Group, Inc.

SSgA Funds Management, Inc.

BlackRock Fund Advisors

Fidelity Management & Research Co

Geode Capital Management LLC

Northern Trust Investments, Inc.

State Farm Investment Management

Wellington Management Co. LLP

T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.

Dimensional Fund Advisors LP

So maybe you should look at whatever the interests of the index fund providers are, and who runs them.

Lukas Walton owned 21% as of the start of the year, more than 3x Vanguard which owns 6.62%. I don't know about the rest of the Walton family - at one point the entire company was Walton owned - but that's nearly $1.5B owned by the company's "Significant Shareholder". I have no idea about the merits of this case but one should note that it's not uncommon for competing companies to sue each other.

"Lukas Walton owned 21% as of the start of the year"

Are you sure about that? Do you have an authoritative source?

I get zero hits for Lukas among Wal-Mart shareholder disclosures on sec.gov. Jim Walton, by contrast, does show up.

Also, Wal-Mart is trading for about $320B, so $1.5B is more like half a percent than twenty percent.

The parent is inferring that Lukas owns a non-insignificant stake of First Solar, a quasi-competitor of Solar City/Telsa, not Walmart themselves.

They're referring, I believe, to the ownership of FSLR: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FSLR/ And Walton is at 21%: https://m.marketscreener.com/FIRST-SOLAR-INC-37008/company/

Ok, sure, but I've lost the thread here. Walton sounds like Walmart, and so does Wall Street and walrus. And this means...?

And Forbes lists Lukas' net worth at $17.6B, so unless he has a ton of other debt, he cannot possibly own more than about 5% of Wal-Mart.

I'm sure they're also rampant short sellers in cahoots with Big Oil. Give me a fucking break.

Tesla has had a lot of growing pains and they'll be a better company when you guys stop dismissing every single criticism and actually hold the company and Musk accountable for their missteps.

Are you implying they set fire to their own stores? Or that you want them to ignore the fires caused by Tesla’s panels?

Hmm. I didn't know this but that's a solid observation.

Regardless, SolarCity probably did a poor installation job with cheap parts. They have a reputation among other Solar installers and it's not a good one.

So are you saying they staged seven fires, or that after 7 of 240 installations caught fire they only sued because of their conflicting interests?

Tesla installed 29 MW of solar last quarter, compared to a peak of 253 MW at Solar City before the acquisition. First Solar, which isn't an apples to apples competitor since it specializes in utility scale, is on track to produce 1375 MW per quarter of panels this year.

Tesla's solar business is dead. They might turn it around with the solar roof product, but if that succeeds it will make Tesla Energy even less of a competitor to First Solar, since it has zero relevance to utility scale solar.

Even if Walmart had evil intent, why give Solar City the PR boost of hundreds of installations in the hope that they'll fail and they can later sue?

It's easy to make a nice conspiratorial quip, but there's nothing of substance here. Jumping at every shadow just numbs you for when you really should be angry.

I wonder if Tesla moving into utility scale battery makes them a competitor or ally to solar. Both right?

I cannot see how it is anything other than ally. Biggest complaint about solar for utilities is that it needs some offset to match peaks. That is accomplished with batteries.

Generally, batteries compete with the power sources that can be turned on and off quickly with control to meet spiky demand. Solar doesn't produce power at the whims of the operators and is not in that category.

Talk about putting words in someone's mouth. The original comment merely points out an interesting note in that both parties have their own interest in solar. You make so many specific counter-claims to a simple sentence that it seems like you're responding to the wrong comment.

The post he was replying to was clearly implying foul play, as it would not have any relevance to the story otherwise. What I think is odd is the fact that you parse human language like a machine rather than a human. There is more to human language than the extremely literal interpretation of the words in a sentence. Implied meaning is one of those things.

> The Walton Family also happens to own much of First Solar, a competing provider of photovoltaic cells.

Where is foul play implied in that sentence? To me it reads like more of an aside than an allegation of wrong doing. The stakes of this particular suit feel more "business-as-usual" than malicious or strategic.

The Walton family owns a lot of other things as well, but the mention of solar was clearly to suggest a conflict of interest.

If I misinterpreted the parent, I'm genuinely happy to delete my post and apologize. But I don't think I did.

I interpreted the post the same way.

Csteubs is correct - there was no implication of foul play in the original post. Typically when there's an article about a business dispute like this, you would expect the article to include relevant information about overlapping business interests, so I added that for context.

Looks like it's too late to delete or edit, but I'm sorry for misinterpreting what you were saying. Looks like I was the irrationally paranoid one, after all :)