71–80 of 154 posts
A friend of mine is a union electrician with 15 years in the trade. He’s helped install dozens of solar farms across Northern California. One thing I found interesting/unnerving was that apparently the spacing tolerances between panels is quite low. He said it’s their biggest concern when it comes to fires. So, maintenance seems like a must. Especially on rooftops or structures that will naturally “settle” over time.…
>totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket losses, Walmart said in the lawsuit. This amount is immaterial for each party involved.
In terms of corporate Walmart, absolutely. But it's annoying as can be -- and even scary -- to employees at those stores. Customers too. Walmart's real objective with a very public suit like this is to make sure that customers and employees see Tesla/Solar City as the villain. Not America's biggest retailer. Even tight-fisted businesses get righteous about this kind of stuff. It's a great way to win the "we care" pos…
>totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket losses, Walmart said in the lawsuit. This amount is immaterial for each party involved.
In terms of corporate Walmart, absolutely. But it's annoying as can be -- and even scary -- to employees at those stores. Customers too. Walmart's real objective with a very public suit like this is to make sure that customers and employees see Tesla/Solar City as the villain. Not America's biggest retailer. Even tight-fisted businesses get righteous about this kind of stuff. It's a great way to win the "we care" pos…
Yes, I think Tesla should be more diligent here.
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Talk about putting words in someone's mouth. The original comment merely points out an interesting note in that both parties have their own interest in solar. You make so many specific counter-claims to a simple sentence that it seems like you're responding to the wrong comment.
Csteubs is correct - there was no implication of foul play in the original post. Typically when there's an article about a business dispute like this, you would expect the article to include relevant information about overlapping business interests, so I added that for context.
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Blatant nepotism and self dealing might be normal at WeWork and Tesla but some companies do have better corporate governance.
Yeah Walmart is really a bastion of moral integrity in corporate America
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Isn't the largest shareholder Vanguard, by far? My impression based on a cursory Googling is that Vanguard has about 130 million shares, whereas the largest individual shareholder, Jim Walton, only has about 10 million. In fact all of the top 10 shareholders of Walmart have more shares (>10M) than any of the Waltons, it appears: The Vanguard Group, Inc. SSgA Funds Management, Inc. BlackRock Fund Advisors Fidelity Man…
Lukas Walton owned 21% as of the start of the year, more than 3x Vanguard which owns 6.62%. I don't know about the rest of the Walton family - at one point the entire company was Walton owned - but that's nearly $1.5B owned by the company's "Significant Shareholder". I have no idea about the merits of this case but one should note that it's not uncommon for competing companies to sue each other.
Are you sure about that? Do you have an authoritative source?
I get zero hits for Lukas among Wal-Mart shareholder disclosures on sec.gov. Jim Walton, by contrast, does show up.
Also, Wal-Mart is trading for about $320B, so $1.5B is more like half a percent than twenty percent.
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The post he was replying to was clearly implying foul play, as it would not have any relevance to the story otherwise. What I think is odd is the fact that you parse human language like a machine rather than a human. There is more to human language than the extremely literal interpretation of the words in a sentence. Implied meaning is one of those things.
> The Walton Family also happens to own much of First Solar, a competing provider of photovoltaic cells. Where is foul play implied in that sentence? To me it reads like more of an aside than an allegation of wrong doing. The stakes of this particular suit feel more "business-as-usual" than malicious or strategic.
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It was originally SolarCity that did the work, but SolarCity was acquired by and merged into Tesla. The surviving entity was Tesla, so Walmart sued Tesla. (SolarCity's debts actually represent the majority part of Tesla's debt load and is part of why Tesla has been struggling financially despite 19%+ margin on each car sold.)
Is there a good place to find those numbers? We always hear about Tesla debt but not the distinction of solar city debt.
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My friends at SolarCity never had to work 70h in a week before Tesla acquired them (nor work weekends installing solar panels on Musk mansion in L.A.) So it might very well be the result of the same company and processes.
Honestly with all the Tesla shorts trolling HN, an unsubstantiated comment like this from a fresh account is very suspicious. Can you post from an account with more comment history?
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> The media coverage for EVs is not proportional Do we have EV car fire frequencies for comparison with ICE engines? Without denominators saying “all cats burn” is overly reductive.
> Do we have EV car fire frequencies for comparison with ICE engines? Without denominators saying “all cats burn” is overly reductive. Fine. And yet, is Reuters reporting those? In fact, why is Reuters even talking about cars? Tesla fires feature very prominently in the news whenever they happen. When was the last time anyone here saw news of ICE fires? I only ever see those in local news, and only if they caused oth…