the first Solar Roof tiles wouldn’t be installed
on a real customer’s home for at least another
seven months. The ones atop the Universal
Studios homes weren’t functional.
But that’s the magic of Musk. Few entrepre-
neurs in his stratosphere could make such a
grandiose pitch land so solidly. His cousins, the
Rives, had struggled to sell a fraction of this vi-
sion to Wall Street during their latter years run-
ning SolarCity as a public company; Musk did
it in 14 minutes. To him, this future—in which
his combined companies will save us from the
destructive forces of climate change—is simply
“logical” and “quite obvious,” phrases he re-
peats to me a few months after the deal closed.
“It’s totally logical that we’ll have sustainable
energy in the long term, because unsustain-
able energy, by definition, is unsustainable,”
he says. “So how quickly do we get there? And
to what degree do we negatively impact the
environment by getting there slower?”
Musk has always approached innovation
this way: as a massive bet on the inevitability
of tomorrow, rather than what he can deliver
today. He designs the future and wills it into
existence, despite the disbelievers. Tesla and
SpaceX, which many viewed as the wild gam-
bles of a stretched-thin entrepreneur keen to
waste billions of his (and others’) dollars, have
proved more risky to bet against. This year,
in fact, Tesla became the most perilous stock
to short, costing speculators billions—more
than the combined losses of those trading
against Apple, Amazon, and Netflix. In that
sense, Musk has become the face of salvation
to some, and motivation to others. “BMW is
using a picture of me to scare their executives
into taking electric vehicles seriously. I’m not
kidding,” Musk says. “It’s sort of a backhanded
compliment.” All of this makes him the—to use
his word—obvious person to lead the solar-
energy industry forward: Lyndon Rive, Solar-
City’s CEO, announced on May 15 that he’d be
leaving the company.
Even so, within Tesla, there were serious
doubts about the merger. “There was almost no
understanding for what SolarCity was inside
the broader company, and that includes Elon,”
says a knowledgeable source. “They didn’t un-
derstand the business.” Yet Musk is famous
for mastering information quickly, and again,
who’s going to bet against him? If he’s wrong,
SolarCity could prove to be a serious strain
on Tesla’s resources. Solar power might be an
undeniable part of our future—the industry
created double the amount of jobs as coal did
last year and accounts for nearly 40% of electric
capacity added to the grid, more than wind or
even natural gas—but SolarCity itself isn’t. In its last reported earnings quarter before
the merger, SolarCity saw a 26% year-over-year decrease in its megawatts installed, a
key growth metric of solar power. If he’s right, however, he’ll move a big step closer to
realizing his vision for a cleaner planet.
Not surprisingly, Musk says he isn’t worried. “Oh, it definitely will work,” he says.
“It’s just a question of when.”
Since the acquisition, Musk has been regularly making the 2-mile drive from
Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, to SolarCity’s R&D center to look at Solar Roof
prototypes. I glimpse a number of designs myself, during a visit to Fremont in April.
They’re installed on two model roofs sitting in the office’s back parking lot, like parts of
a prefab house waiting for pickup. “When we think something is ready, we’ll bring Elon
out here,” says Peter Rive, formerly SolarCity’s CTO and now Tesla’s VP of solar products,
standing outside near the models on the cloudy afternoon. “He’ll tell us if it’s pass or fail.”
Musk stresses that such collaborative engineering couldn’t have happened before
the merger. Because they were previously separate public companies (with those many
conflicts of interest), SolarCity and Tesla were required to operate at an “arm’s length.”
Musk feels that aesthetics, in particular,
will be crucial for SolarCity, which hopes to
win over the kinds of consumers who might
balk at installing traditional solar panels
on top of their houses. After all, Musk has
explained that Tesla gre w from his vie w that
electric vehicles were “ugly and slow and boring like a golf cart.” He created the Power-
wall, he has said, because all existing batteries “sucked. . . . They’re expensive, unreli-
able, stinky, ugly, bad in every way.” If there was one implied criticism of his cousins
during the product event last fall, it was that they were never quite able to pull off this
transformation, from the useful to the beautiful. “The key is to make solar something
desirable,” Musk said onstage, so “you want to put it on the most prominent part of
your house, call your neighbors over, and say, ‘Check out this sweet roof!’ ”
Musk’s tiles might prove as sexy to customers as his vehicles. Gavin Baker, who runs
a $13.8 billion portfolio at Fidelity, increased the firm’s investment in SolarCity right
before the acquisition, and he has said he’s bullish on the product. But the residential
solar industry is still Byzantine and fragmented, involving things like building permits,
regulatory roadblocks, and individual roof assessments. And then there’s the issue of
price. The SolarCity roof requires a complete re-roofing job, unlike traditional solar
“BMW IS USING A PICTURE
OF ME TO SCARE THEIR
EXECUTIVES INTO TAKING
ELECTRIC VEHICLES SERIOUSLY.
I’M NOT KIDDING,” MUSK
SAYS. “IT’S SORT OF A
BACKHANDED COMPLIMENT.”
