Well, let's be clear about the timeline. Silevo was planning a factory in upstate New York, and the State of New York was planning to invest $225 million in that project.

In June 2014, SolarCity agreed to acquire Silevo.

Three months later, with Elon Musk's personal involvement, the Cuomo Administration agreed to increase their investment to $750 million, in a much-expanded deal.

Construction of the factory began under SolarCity ownership in September 2014.

Tesla acquired SolarCity in November 2016. One month later, Tesla announced that Panasonic would assemble the solar modules at Gigafactory 2/New York.

Interesting info. If they got 750 million statewide investment, the factory used $700 million of it then? 50 mil left over? I hate state investments in businesses via direct or tax cuts. But this couldn't be worse than Washington state's massive tax cuts for boeing, which proceeded to move more production and jobs to their east coast factory right after they got the tax brake.

> But this couldn't be worse than Washington state's massive tax cuts for boeing,

I see your Boeing deal and raise you one Wisconsin deal with Foxconn that will cost the state $4.5 billion and thousands of jobs that most likely never existed.

Is there a worse tax deal a state has ever made? Anyone?

okay, you win, that's probably worse. That foxconn deal looked like it could end up with just a few dozen new jobs.

Based on your timeline, it seems that Tesla was already, at least partially engaged since SolarCity's acquisition of Silevo.

So the whole project is stuck in development hell? Is this going to be "Gigafactory/2"? I guess the question I need to ask is "is this project dead or on hold?"

Why would have Elon Musk been involved? Did he actively participate in SolarCity management before the acquisition?

Yes.

Solar City was a Musk (nee Rive) family business from the start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarCity#History

> SolarCity was founded in 2006 by brothers Peter and Lyndon Rive, based on a suggestion for a solar company concept by their cousin, Elon Musk, who is the chairman and helped start the company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_Rive

> Rive is a cousin of SolarCity investor and entrepreneur Elon Musk, as their mothers are twins

(That means that Rive and Musk are genetically half-siblings.)

> (That means that Rive and Musk are genetically half-siblings.)

Apropos of nothing, I'm now imagining a world with forms of address based on the natural logarithm of shared genetic material.

There is an app that will tell you and another person with the same app how closely related you are and will show the ancestry chain between the two of you. It turns out the my wife and I are 10th cousins (common great-whatever grandparents in the 1600s). I started calling her my cousin-wife, but she didn't think it was funny, so I had to stop ;-)

10th cousin is basically “not related”. That same app (Relative Finder) says that Obama is my 10th cousin.

What is the app called?

Isn't this roughly how people talk about their relationship with Native American tribes? They don't do the log2 math, but they're happy to hit you with the fraction.

Certainly, First Nation People of Australia had a language of their own for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship

You're probably thinking of "blood quantum." It's... complicated.

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/02/09/583987261...

I come from an old Jewish family that's supposed to come King David, and I recently met a girl who comes from another family like that (rabbinical sources describe a dozen or so families with reasonable claims to Davidic lineage). We used to joke that we're longest removed siblings ever, and now I'm curious about what that natural logarithm would actually look like.

Wait wait, the evidence for "Musk was personally involved" was "his cousin did it"? I mean, it's hard to tell whether there's any wrongdoing here to allege at all, honestly. But to the extent there is: I think the upthread question is still unanswered. What does this have to do with Tesla?

Well, that and he (apparently) suggested it to them.

I think the cousin thing is just explaining why they were interacting at all.

If you follow the PV panel manufacturing industry this is actually not super uncommon, there's a number of companies that have gone belly up in the past ten years.

In some cases due to business models that relied on weird economic incentives for the panel manufacturing location, where 156mm cells purchased on the commodity market from a third party would be encapsulated and built up into 60 or 72-cell panels.

Google "solar panel manufacturer bankrupt" for some noteworthy examples.

Margins on PV panel manufacturing are REALLY thin.

Indeed they are. And manufacturer plants are expensive, so competition is kind of cut-throat to get high volume orders. Also capacities used to be largely under utilized in the last years. This forced prices further down, eroding more margin. No wonder all big manufacturers, with the exception thin film, are in China where it is easy for them to get financing.

I think most businesses could crush their competitors if one of the worlds largest economies decided to be their bottomless patron. Framing it as "getting financing" makes it sound like some kind of venture capitalist affair when the reality is that China decided to kill foreign competitors with heavy state subsidies and all the California hippies cheered for it because they cheer for anything with the word solar attached.

Yeah, that's true. But the China is communicating this fact in their five year plans. So the competition can hardly be surprised.

IMHO, it is still close to the VC model. Just in a very strategic and state backed way. e.g. Yingli Solar was for a very long period the biggest manufacturer of solar modules worldwide. Until they screwed up financially, now they aren't top ten anymore.

Contracts between entities don't just disappear when the entities involved change hands. Pending business arrangements should have all been factored in to the equity of the purchase.

Sure. But inheriting a deal is very, very different from originating a deal.

No, it's not. In an acquisition, you acquire the liabilities as well as the assets.

Right. But the point is, depicting this as though Tesla bought $50M in solar equipment and just left it to sit in a warehouse is misleading. In reality, Tesla bought a company which bought another company which had $50M in solar manufacturing equipment. The fact that they aren't using assets which were brought into Tesla's possession with three layers of indirection is a lot less surprising.

This was an acquisition, not an inheritance. Though maybe he would have inherited control in the fullness of time since it came from his half brothers.

They can have change of control provisions.

Poor Tesla.

How could they understand that you acquire contract obligations when you acquire a company?

Yep, seems like another short-and-distort campaign. I can't wait to have this brought up in anti-Tesla reddit arguments for the next 12 months.