Monday, August 1, 2016

Tesla-Solar City: Cousins Shouldn't Get Married (to each other) TSLA; SCTY--UPDATED

Update below.
Original post:
 
I wasn't going to link to anything on the TSLA/SCTY merger, it's a bad deal for Tesla and a good one for SolarCity but you can get that opinion almost anywhere.
And then I thought "We've been posting on SolarCity since before the IPO, we might as well book-end the story"
Here's our Dec. 13, 2012 post "After Price Cut Elon Musk's SolarCity Trades, Soars (SCTY)":
The stock was priced at $8.00, down from the $13-15 range the underwriters were throwing out earlier this week.
It is currently trading at $11.60, up 45%.
From earth2tech GigaOm cleantech:...
Speaking of bookends, the link was to Katie Fehrenbacher, at that time hanging out at an Om Malik property. Here she is writing for Fortune:

SolarCity Lowers Annual Guidance on Weaker Home Solar Demand
Is the market for home rooftop solar panels maturing in states like California?
As it goes through the process of being acquired by electric car maker Tesla Motors, solar installer SolarCity has lowered its forecast for how many solar panels it would install this year, blaming weaker than expected bookings in the first half of the year.

The news on Monday sent SolarCity’s SCTY -7.42% shares down 8% in morning trading to $24.56.
The solar company doesn’t plan to announce its full second quarter earnings until Aug. 9, but it likely had to release some financial metrics early because of updated deal terms for its acquisition that were also disclosed on Monday.

Tesla TSLA -2.18% announced that it planned to acquire SolarCity in late June, but the deal announced on Monday was slightly less lucrative for SolarCity. SolarCity shareholders will now receive fewer shares of Tesla—0.110—than the 0.122 to 0.131 shares that were originally proposed....
...MORE

So, thanks to cousin Elon, SolarCity's CEO Lyndon Rive ended up making quite a bit of money rather than facing an almost-certain insolvency.
We'll just have to wait and see how the kids turn out.

Update from Bloomberg: "Musk’s SolarCity Offer Wipes Out His Cousins’ Stock Options"

The last time I looked Lyndon Rive had around 4 million shares that he owned outright. That was a year ago and I haven't followed all the SEC Forms 4 that he's filed since that 10K but 4 mil. is the number that sticks in my head. On the other hand Yahoo Finance is showing 683K directly held shares (2,268,356 indirect) so maybe he sold some.