Headline Story Over At WSJ: For Tesla, The Forecast Is Partly Cloudy; We've Seen This Movie Before; Losses Are Horrendous -- July 10, 2016

Link here. It looks like we've seen this movie before.

Mr. Musk said that bringing electric cars, solar panels and battery storage under one corporate roof would produce operational synergies and create “the potential for Tesla to be a $1 trillion market cap company.”

That’s about 32 times Tesla’s current valuation.

Neither company (Tesla nor SolcarCity), though aided considerably by government renewable-energy subsidies, has ever recorded an annual profit.

Last year Tesla lost $889 million—nearly three times as much as in 2014—while SolarCity’s loss doubled to $769 million. Investors may be feeling déjà vu as a shadow has fallen over the solar industry.

In April, the renewable-energy conglomerate SunEdison filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy following an Icarus-like fall. A year ago, former CEO Ahmad Chatila predicted that his company would be worth $350 billion by 2020—about 35 times its market capitalization at the time. Nine months later, the stock price had plunged by 99%, to 21 cents per share.

SunEdison’s stock first began to tumble last July when Mr. Chatila proposed paying $2.2 billion for the rooftop-solar installer Vivint Solar (the deal was scrapped in March), which activist investors lambasted as overpriced. It soon became clear that SunEdison’s growth, enabled by debt and complicated financial engineering, was unsustainable. 

Notwithstanding Mr. Chatila’s sunny forecasts, the company had failed to earn a profit in five years. An internal probe in April faulted a lack of accounting controls and an “overly optimistic culture and its tone at the top.” The Tesla-SolarCity deal is an all-stock exchange, but the SunEdison fiasco is a flashing yellow light.

Much more at the link. Meanwhile, the AP is reporting that MuskMelon has "another secret masterplan."

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, under pressure after a fatal crash involving one of his electric cars, went on Twitter Sunday to say he's working on another "Top Secret Tesla Masterplan." He said he hoped to publish details this week.

The tantalizing message echoes an August 2006 blog post, titled "The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me)," in which Musk unveiled the cars that became the Tesla Model S four-door family car and the Tesla 3 sports sedan.

About the time we start hearing "secret plans" about anything, it seems it is just a matter of time before the house of cards starts to fall.