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Comment by i80and | Hacker News Reader

Tesla was pushing solar pretty hard for a time a long time ago. My memories actually line up with the charts here.

Then they kind of just... stopped talking about it at all? In retrospect it was kind of a quiet sea change for the company as a whole.

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That whole solar city acquisition was a bit of a debacle with Elon buying a very suspect and deeply indebted company that his cousins had founded and controlled for a questionable amount of money… that was probably the first big warning sign that Tesla’s board was out to lunch.

Yeah I don't think Tesla ever really cared about solar, they just had to talk the talk for a bit to help grease a very shady business deal (with strong echoes of the recently announced xAI/X deal).

I agree the whole thing was shady, but did they really never care about solar? I thought the solar roof was announced well after the SolarCity deal, and it seemed like they were serious about ramping that up for a while (though obviously that never really went anywhere or fulfilled any of the original promises either).

It's likely just not high-margin enough to satisfy Tesla investors. Panels have become commoditized.

They were pushing it hard because at the time they needled to deflect the accusations that the SolarCity purchase was fraud, nepotism, and insider dealing. Now that most people have forgotten about that, there's no need to talk about it anymore.

Agreed. They stopped talking about it...

I have a feeling they are not really that competitive in this market segment, but were helped by a strong brand.

Anyone know if they actually make money on Solar at all, and have an idea what their profit margin is?

And what does the the competition look like (also for e.g. PowerWall)?

>I have a feeling they are not really that competitive in this market segment, but were helped by a strong brand.

All commoditized market segments are like that to varying extents.

SolarCity was about to go bankrupt (owned by Elon Musk’s cousins), so he found a way to justify bailing them out with Tesla money. He held the famous solar roof event, saying that all the homes behind him had solar roofs cheaper than a normal roof, which was later proven a lie. Tesla’s entire solar business was built on that foundation, and they struggled to justify it in the long term.

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