SolarCity (Tesla Energy)
Chairman & principal backer
The rooftop-solar company Musk conceived and chaired, acquired by Tesla in 2016 to form its energy business.
www.tesla.com/solarpanels~$2.6B
Tesla acquisition (2016)
2006
Founded
Tesla Energy
Now
SolarCity was founded in 2006 by Musk's cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive, based on an idea from Musk, who served as chairman and was its principal financial backer. It became one of the largest residential solar installers in the United States, pioneering the no-money-down solar lease.
Tesla acquired SolarCity for about $2.6 billion in 2016, folding it into Tesla Energy alongside the Powerwall and the new Solar Roof. Critics called the deal a bailout of a Musk-linked company, but it was approved by more than 85% of Tesla's unaffiliated shareholders — those with no executive role at either firm. The combination gave Tesla an end-to-end clean-energy stack: generate (solar), store (Powerwall/Megapack), and drive (EVs).
Milestones
Founded by the Rive brothers on Musk's concept; Musk chairs the board.
Acquired by Tesla to form Tesla Energy.
Everything about SolarCity (Tesla Energy)
Everything on ElonFacts about SolarCity / Tesla Energy — rooftop solar, the Solar Roof, and grid-scale storage.
Key metrics
Achievements (3)
X.com becomes PayPal
Musk founds the online bank X.com, which becomes PayPal — acquired by eBay for $1.5B and seeding the "PayPal Mafia."
SolarCity and the Solar Roof
Tesla acquires SolarCity and launches the Solar Roof, completing an end-to-end clean-energy stack: generate, store, drive.
Tesla launches Powerwall 3 with a built-in solar inverter
Powerwall 3 integrated a solar inverter directly into the home battery, raising power output and simplifying installs — making whole-home solar-plus-storage cheaper and cleaner.
Myth busters (2)
Claim: Musk got rich because his family owned an apartheid emerald mine.
Reality: There is no documented evidence that Musk's family owned an emerald mine. The story traces to inconsistent anecdotes from his father, Errol Musk, who has given several conflicting versions and produced no ownership records or company filings; the documented account is that he bought a share of the output of mines in Zambia (not apartheid South Africa) for a few years. Biographer Walter Isaacson, who interviewed Errol directly, found no evidence of mine ownership, and Snopes rates the claim unproven. Musk's seed capital is fully traceable: he netted roughly $175–180 million from the 2002 sale of PayPal and reinvested it into SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity — then nearly went bankrupt in 2008. He did grow up in an affluent white South African family, but the specific "emerald-mine fortune built Tesla" claim is unsupported.
Claim: Musk isn’t self-made — he was born rich and just got lucky.
Reality: Musk grew up comfortable, but the specific companies that made him the world's wealthiest person were built, not inherited. He turned ~$22 million from Zip2 into X.com/PayPal, then reinvested ~$175 million from PayPal's sale into SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity — ventures most investors thought were doomed. In 2008 it nearly cost him everything: three Falcon 1 failures, Tesla days from missing payroll, and Musk putting in his last personal cash; the Tesla rescue financing reportedly closed in the final hours of Christmas Eve. "Luck" doesn't explain landing orbital rockets, building the best-selling car on Earth, or assembling a 100,000-GPU supercomputer in 122 days. A privileged start is real; the claim that he simply coasted on inherited money is contradicted by a documented record of repeated, near-ruinous risk.