SolarCity

But anyhow.

Back in 2016, Elon Musk used Tesla's shareholder money to acquire Solar City, a struggling solar company that he also chaired and partly owned.

To help justify the deal, he staged a public demonstration of Solar City's solar roof tiles during the acquisition negotiations.

The tiles were later found by a Delaware court to have been actually inoperable and far from ready to go to market.

At the time of the demonstration, The court reviewed the entire transaction under its strictest standard of scrutiny, describing the process as deeply flawed, noted Musk's apparent inability to acknowledge his clear conflict of interest, and then found the deal entirely fair anyway, largely because 85% of the shareholders had approved it, and Tesla's stock subsequently went up.

And so I started to really invest in understanding what does it take to live like that? And that work that I did on myself led me to leave this company I was working for that wasn't really the right fit for me.

And I joined a company named SolarCity.

SolarCity was then later acquired by Tesla.

And I found that where I thrived was in taking things that were complex and simplifying them for people and training and coaching folks.

And I was really doing well in this environment that was really chaotic at Tesla.

In fact, I tried to put together a deal as a, you know, twenty-one-year-old college kid to go lease a piece of land on, uh, the big island of Hawaii, which has really low-cost land and really high-cost electricity, build a solar array.

Actually, it was gonna be EPCd at the time by SolarCity, who was doing a lot of utility scale EPC.

This is before they sold to Tesla?

Yes.

That if you lend money to someone who buys a GPU, let's say Google or sm- or a startup, CoreWeave, and that startup goes out of business and you have that GPU as collateral against that investment, we'll buy back the GPU for up to 25% of the value of the GPU." And so they're succeeding in creating a liquid secondary market for GPUs that they're underwriting, so now the large banks have an incentive to loan money at much better interest rates.

This is actually exactly what Elon did in the beginning of SolarCity.

He went to Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch and got them to amortize the price of a solar panel over 30 years.

So the whole invention behind SolarCity was the fact that you could take a loan against the collateral of your solar panel.

So NVIDIA has done an amazing job now in creating a clear floor for the value of the G- GPU over time.

Do you think the circular economy fears that people often cast against NVIDIA are justified or not? We saw their CFO push back on them and say, "Enough.

It was almost 10 years ago, it's actually in October, that they had the solar roof event.

That was actually before they completed the SolarCity acquisition.

But that was the first one to me that I just remember so vividly because I think there was a start time.

It was live-streamed, and it started something like five or six hours late.

And rule number 10, the last time before a very special bonus clip, is manage your time wisely.

So you're running, you're CEO of two companies, you're chairman of SolarCity.

Talk about time management.

How on earth do you do this?

So, I mean, we're going to be talking about a lot of different – things tonight and they sort of all come together and what I would sort of propose as like a grand unifying theory that i will offer and predict and we'll see if i'm right in 10 years but um but elon plays a big part in all this so i thought maybe we'd just start by talking about him a little bit so um people have strong opinions about him i became fascinated by him in the early days you know after he got out of paypal with 30 million dollars or whatever it was And he started Tesla.

He started SolarCity.

He started SpaceX.

And he seemed to me like a Barnum Bailey kind of guy.

One is leveraging government.

He knows how to turn taxpayer money into a business that he owns.

SolarCity, great example.

Tesla, you know, millions, many, many millions, maybe billions of dollars in tax credits for electric vehicles and batteries.