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Comment by Overtonwindow | Hacker News Reader

I feel like we've been down this road before. If some may recall, the federal government setup a giant loan program for alt energy companies. Many went bust taking a lot of money with them. I worry if the investment dollars are going to Just Another Solar Company, or is it demonstrated, proven technology that has potential?

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Tesla was part of that program and without that loan they would not be around today. Also, the loans are expected to profitable [1], although I read somewhere that when accounting for administration costs, the program overall would end up slightly in the red[2]. Regardless, the program created/saved thousands of jobs and provided badly needed financing to companies during one of the worst recessions in decades, which in my book means it was very successful.

[1] http://energy.gov/lpo/portfolio [2] The bill that created the program required that the loans be given out 'at cost'. Had the DOE been allowed to charge even modestly more, or had they asked for stock options as part of their deals, the program could have been wildly profitable.

>Tesla was part of that program and without that loan they would not be around today.

I like Tesla, but it's still not entirely clear Tesla is a viable ongoing enterprise. If Tesla can't make money with the Model 3 it's unlikely to survive in the long term.

In the mean time they fully paid back their DOE loans, have paid billions in salaries / benefits, spent billions at suppliers, built considerable useful infrastructure, and accelerated the progress of electric vehicles by some amount of time. I'd say it's a net win from the taxpayer perspective.

Couldn't you say this about any company? Anybody is unlikely to survive in the long term if they can't make money with their products. But from everything I've read, Tesla has made money with their vehicles so far, so I don't see why you'd worry about the Model 3.

You would've been a gem in the 1920s shaking an angry fist at how many oil companies were going bust and how fortunes were being squandered digging wells that produced nothing.

That whole oil thing is just a fad! Why can't people be happy with coal?

I think you misread the comment. Oil was proven and investment was pushing it to new heights. Do we really want to spend a lot of money on the same technology, and a new company, or new technology and innovation? I for one don't want another Solyndra. I want a company that is pushing a demonstrated advancement in technology.

Oh, come on. Open a history book. Oil was far from proven back when coal was king. Many, many companies ate up huge amounts of capital and had nothing to show for it. The process for finding, extracting, processing, transporting and consuming oil and its various byproducts was still in its infancy. There was a lot of mistakes to be made.

You're losing your shit here because some companies didn't work out. And? The road to success is often paved with failure.

Solyndra pushed a demonstrated advance in technology. It just didn't end up being cheaper than the rapidly-falling price of silicon solar cells. Sure, you can play Monday-morning quarterback on that deal, but it was a reasonable bet and the investors (who lost a ton of money) were not fools.

Mitt Romney, comparing Tesla to Solyndra, in 2012:

> But don’t forget, you put $90 billion, like 50 years’ worth of breaks, into—into solar and wind, to Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla and Ener1. I mean, I had a friend who said you don’t just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers, all right? So this—this is not—this is not the kind of policy you want to have if you want to get America energy secure.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/10/04/mitt_romn...

One failed investment does not make a bad strategy.

Similarly, if one invested in 1920s in aviation, one most likely lost the money.

>Many went bust

As is expected with investment.

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