And they sure seem good for Tesla and SolarCity shareholders. TSLA is back to within spitting distance of the all-time-high, $265, changing hands at $256.79, up $$6.23 in pre-market action while SCTY is four bucks from its old high at $84.40.
From The New Yorker:
In a story for this week's magazine, I tried to explain the brewing fight among Silicon Valley tech leaders over how to engage the national political apparatus: whether they should stay arm's length and hire paid lobbyists to advance their corporate self-interests, à la Wall Street or Big Oil; whether they should engage in a genuine hearts-and-minds campaign to win over the general public and spread their bounty to the rest of the country; or whether they should ditch politics altogether and decamp to their libertarian seasteads.
Bloomberg has a fascinating story today about how, over the course of three years, tech billionaire Elon Musk has chosen Option One by hiring lobbyists to pit local officials in Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Puerto Rico against each other over which one would get to host a new commercial launchpad for his SpaceX rockets.
No official spot for the launchpad has been chosen yet. But Bloomberg reports that after a lengthy back-and-forth, officials in Brownsville, Texas, have offered Musk what he wanted – "$20 million of financial incentives, laws changed to close a public beach during launches and legal protection from noise complaints" – in exchange for what Brownsville wanted: a giant launchpad that would attract roughly 600 jobs to an economically depressed region.
Musk was always going to get his way. The promise of hundreds of new, high-tech jobs is catnip for local lawmakers, and it was a question of how big SpaceX's incentives were going to be, not whether the company would get them. But Musk played hardball anyway....MORE
