Fisker Chairman in 2009: Obama is Great Because He Invested in Solyndra
Ray Lane of VC Kleiner Perkins is seen in this video trumpeting how the Obama Administration is, for the first time in his memory, succesfully making investments in private companies. His main example: Solyndra!
The reason this is particularly timely and fascinating is that just a few weeks ago, Ray Lane took delivery of the first Fisker Karma electric car, financed with $529 million of our tax money and promoted with $7500 of our tax money on every sale, Mr. Lane and Kleiner are investors in Fisker (and Lane is Fisker's Chairman) and therefore huge beneficiaries of Obama's largess, and Mr. Lane got the first Karma as a big thank you for his political connections that helped score the cash.
Of course Kleiner (who also hired green Crony-in-chief Al Gore) is going to be thrilled with the government money. Nothing is worse than being a VC in with a large early round position in a company and being unable to get the next stage of investment. Since it appears they could not get any private investors to fund this, the taxpayer money probably saved their investment .... at least for a while.
Update: Ray Lane is apparently ticked off by the negative publicity surrounding the Fisker Karma and the money they received from taxpayers. Tough. Surely he is used to his investors being ticked off about bad outcomes. Well, now he gets to see how REALLY ticked off his investors can be when their money was taken against their will, even without their knowledge. At least he can tell his institutional guys, when things go bad, that they came in with eyes open. What's his response to taxpayers?
For those who have not seen it, my article on how the Fisker Karma, even on all electric, uses more fossil fuels per mile than an SUV is here.
Val:
"Well, now he gets to see how REALLY ticked off his investors can be when their money was taken against their will"
Somehow I doubt it. Ask any random person off the street right now what the big deal is about the multiple gunwalker issues, and if they even know about them at all, they will have zero understanding of the seriousness. What makes anybody think that the 'taxpayer' will get really p.o.'d about this? Especially when it is so easily negated by the positive 'good for the environment' spinning that will tap into and activate the meme built reflex to overlook when the ends justifies the means.
October 23, 2011, 9:09 amEl Polacko:
This is the second recorded and documented instance I am aware of where unabashed Obama supporters and fund raising bundlers have admitted having advance insider knowledge of the governments intention to shove billions of borrowed dollars out the governments door to finance green scams that could not attract private financing. It will be interesting to see if KP has also pushed themselves to the head of the creditors line.
Here's a link to Kaiser giving a speech in Tulsa where he lets the cat out of the bag.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19tD9xDoNmE&feature=player_embedded
October 23, 2011, 10:08 amMax:
Well, the funny part is, that the most "clean" transportation out there are actually trucks. They transport 1 ton at roughly 1 l/100 km. No car, not even gasoline or Diesel cars can make that up in any way. I mean even well-designed Diesel cars consume up to 5 l/100 km and they carry not even 1 ton cargo.
However, well-to-wheel analysis are very rare, because they are hard to do and yet they are the best metric to measure efficiency (or greeniness).
October 25, 2011, 9:48 amI wonder if the EPA calculated the costs and environmental impact of recycling all the materials of the Karma? I mean batteries are actually one of the most terrible things to recycle. Very expensive, very un-environmentally friendly. And then there is all the sheet metal and plastic that has to be remoulded (probably with a lot of additives in it - I doubt they used arboform(http://www.tecnaro.de/english/avsk.htm))...
epobirs:
Yeah, crooks are always angry when someone catches them at their scam.
October 31, 2011, 9:59 pm