Many of them, in fact, were first drawn
to Tesla by SolarCity, with its pile of debt
and mountain of losses. “If it weren’t
for SolarCity, #TSLAQ wouldn’t exist,”
says @TeslaCharts. He points out that
Musk faced a catch-22 of sorts: If he
hadn’t bailed out SolarCity, his whole
debt-laden empire might have cracked.
Yet without the bailout, Tesla would be
far more healthy. “When the history of
Tesla is written,” he says, “the acquisition
of SolarCity will be seen as the moment
where the narrative took a decisive turn.”
Others shared @TeslaCharts’ suspi-
cions about Solar Roof. Robinson, who
covers SolarCity for the Buffalo News, had
flown to Los Angeles for Musk’s presenta-
tion. Afterward, he asked an engineer for
the company if the tiles Musk had point-
ed to were real. “Oh no,” the engineer
replied. “These are dummies. We just
popped them up here to show you.” Rob-
inson 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.
And Tesla continued to make it sound
that way. In early 2018, the company
announced that production of the Solar
Roof had begun in Buffalo. That fall, Tes-
la told Bloomberg News it was “gearing
up for tremendous growth in 2019. We
have a product, we have the customers,
we are just ramping it up to a point where
it is sustainable.”
But a few months later, in its quarterly
letter, Tesla confessed that the product
wasn’t actually ready yet. “We contin-
ue to iterate,” the company wrote. In a
legal filing, Tesla acknowledged that the
much-hyped technology it had acquired
from Silevo wasn’t all that it was cracked
up to be. And last May, an investigation
by Reuters revealed that most of the solar
cells being produced in Buffalo were
being sold overseas, not used in the Solar
Roof, because demand was so low.NOT SO BRIGHT
Governor Andrew
Cuomo (top left)
“actually thought
Musk was the next
Dalai Lama,” says
an Albany lobbyist.
SolarCity panels
(top right) being
installed in New
Jersey, and the new
Solar Roof (bottom)
touted by Musk.Customers who tried to purchase a
Solar Roof took to Twitter to share their
horror stories: Kevin Pereau, a Califor-
nia homeowner, said he paid a deposit
of $2,000 to have a Solar Roof installed
more than two years ago—then never
heard from the company again. He got his
money back only after he started tweet-
ing at Musk every single day.
Musk, meanwhile, is still making
promises. Last March, he proclaimed
that 2019 would be the “year of the Solar
Roof.” In late July, he tweeted that Tesla
is “hoping” to turn out 1,000 Solar Roofs
a week by the end of the year. But even
onetime believers have become doubt-
ers. The MIT Technology Review, which
included the Solar Roof in its list of 10
“breakthrough technologies” in 2016,
now calls it a “flop.” In a recent analyst
note, JP Morgan warned that Solar Roof
will be a “niche” product at best. Musk
has “sustained a kind of Kabuki theaterin which the Solar Roof ramp is always
imminent, but never here,” wrote inves-
tor John Engle, a #TSLAQ member.
Another #TSLAQ member, a Yale-
trained lawyer and investment manager
named Lawrence Fossi, made a discovery
while combing through SolarCity’s finan-
cial 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. The 1,460 “high-tech” jobs at the
factory became just plain old jobs, as did
the 2,000 jobs to support solar sales and
installation in New York. The agreement
to employ 900 people at the factory with-
in two years shrank to 500. And the tim-
ing for the additional jobs was extended
to 10 years after the factory was complet-
ed—at which point the lease would also
be expiring. CONTINUED ON PAGE 115OCTOBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 111PHOTOGRAPHS BY DREW ANGERER (CUOMO),
MICHAEL NAGLE/BLOOMBERG (TRUCK
), BOTH FROM GETTY IMAGES; BY TESLA (ROOF)