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Elon Musk and Warren Buffett Squabble Over Solar In Nevada
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns NV Energy, the largest utility company in Nevada. NV Energy has recently pressured the Nevada PUC to slash the amount it must pay residential solar customers for electricity from rooftop solar arrays. Elon Musk is not happy.
Warren Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway owns NV Energy, Nevada’s largest electric utility. Part of Tesla Motors’ agreement with the State of Nevada regarding the Gigafactory is a provision that guarantees the factory to receive discounted electricity rates for 8 years. However that discount will result in a $1.50 per year increase to existing NV Energy customers, according to the Las Vegas Sun.
Elon Musk has a major role in SolarCity, the rooftop solar company that specializes in helping residential customers obtain rooftop solar systems for their homes. In Nevada, those homeowners were able to sell any excess electricity back to NV Energy through a process known as net metering. The reimbursement rate was set at 11 cents per kilowatt. That extra money helped fuel a boom in residential rooftop solar with SolarCity leading the way.
But recently, under heavy pressure from NV Energy, the Nevada Public Utilities commission slashed the rate to just 2.6 cents per kilowatt. The rooftop solar companies screamed that the move would eviscerate the residential solar industry in the state. SolarCity shut down its operation in Nevada and laid off hundreds of employees.
Warren Buffett told CNBC on Monday that it is ridiculous for NV Energy to pay rooftop solar customers 11 cents per kilowatt when the company’s base cost of electricity from conventional operations is just 5 cents per kilowatt. He says it is unfair for 1,000,000 customers who don’t have rooftop solar to subsidize the 17,000 or so who do. He says Elon Musk has called and spoken to him about the situation.
“He was unhappy,” Buffett said of Musk. Then he added, “He’s being subsidized with his battery plant big time.” Is that really true? The battery factory Buffett is referring to is the Tesla Gigafactory, which has been designed from the start to be net zero. That means it will generate more electricity every year than it uses. Net zero does not mean it will never draw power from the electrical grid. It means it will put more back into the grid than it uses over the course of a year. There is no information available on how the new rules from the Nevada Public Utilities commission may impact Tesla.
Musk always likes to remind people that the $1.3 billion Tesla is receiving in incentives amount to only a small discount compared to the size of the economic benefits the project is conferring on the area. “It makes sense that if something is the biggest thing on Earth, it’s probably going to have incentives that are big in the absolute, but small in relative terms,” Musk says
Warren Buffett likes to say that Berkshire Hathaway is strongly committed to reducing global carbon emissions. But he, like the Koch Brothers, is heavily invested in fossil fuels. According to ThinkProgress, he wrote in his annual letter to investors recently, “Last year, BHE [Berkshire Hathaway Energy] made major commitments to the future development of renewables in support of the Paris Climate Change Conference.”
That may be true, but last year it also nearly doubled its position in Phillips 66 and boosted its investment in Suncor position by nearly seven million shares to 30 million shares, an investment now worth approximately $1.1 billion. Suncor is the Canadian company that seeks to develop the Alberta tar sands, the dirtiest source of petroleum on the planet.
Buffett may be one of the smartest investors in the history of the planet, but he is no leader on climate change issues the way Musk is. His letter to investors had this paragraph: "As a citizen, you may understandably find climate change keeping you up nights. As a homeowner in a low-lying area, you may wish to consider moving. But when you are thinking only as a shareholder of a major insurer, climate change should not be on your list of worries."
ThinkProgress labels coastal flooding as a potential trillion dollar liability. Berkshire Hathaway is one of the largest companies in flood insurance and therefore has a huge potential risk from rising sea levels.
Photo credit: CNBC
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next Starship launch is about to attempt its biggest leap yet
SpaceX targets September 22 for Starship Flight 14, its first attempt to reach real orbit.
SpaceX has set September 22 as the target date for Starship’s 14th test flight, and this one carries a different goal than any of the 13 that came before it. Every previous Starship mission has intentionally flown a suborbital arc, reentering the atmosphere within the same hour it launched. Flight 14 is designed to send the craft into a genuine orbit around Earth for the first time.
The launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. Central time at Starbase in South Texas and runs for 75 minutes, pending regulatory approval, according to SpaceX’s mission description published Tuesday. If the flight goes as planned, Starship will circle the planet roughly six times at an altitude near 275 kilometers over about ten hours before a deorbit burn sends it toward a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, a departure from the Indian Ocean recoveries used on the last several flights.
The mission also marks the first attempt to put a working batch of Starlink V3 satellites into actual service. Flight 13 carried 20 of the new satellites in July, but because that mission never left a suborbital trajectory, the payload reentered along with the ship instead of separating into orbit.
SpaceX tells the FCC that Starship Flight 14 is going to orbit
Each V3 satellite is rated for roughly one terabit per second of downlink capacity, so a successful deployment on Flight 14 would be SpaceX’s largest single jump in network bandwidth since Starlink began flying on Falcon 9.
Flight 13 still did the heavier lifting on the technical side. That July mission flew a deliberately more stressful reentry profile to test Starship’s heat shield, and the ship survived its softest splashdown yet, intact enough for drone inspections shortly after landing. Elon Musk said the flight delivered “all the heat shield data we needed and then some,” a result Teslarati covered in detail when he later said SpaceX had solved the vehicle’s biggest reusability challenge. Flight 14 is where SpaceX starts spending that confidence on an actual orbital insertion rather than another controlled fall back to Earth.
One thing Flight 14 will not attempt is a tower catch of the ship. Musk floated the idea right after Flight 13, but walked the timeline back in August, saying a catch attempt was more likely “in a few months.” The Super Heavy booster will still aim for its own recovery, targeting an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America, the same approach used on recent flights.
September 22 is SpaceX’s own target, not a locked date. Starship’s schedule has slipped before over hardware readiness and FAA sign off, and the company has said as much in its own mission notes. But the plan itself represents the clearest marker yet that Starship is moving from a suborbital test program into something meant to carry paying payloads and, eventually, people.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk gives his most telling Tesla-SpaceX merger conversation yet
Elon Musk hinted a Tesla-SpaceX merger could be coming, and Wall Street is taking notice.
Elon Musk gave his clearest signal yet that Tesla and SpaceX could eventually combine, telling the All-In Summit in Los Angeles that the two companies’ deepening collaboration makes the question worth asking. Sawyer Merritt first surfaced the highlight on X Tuesday.
Asked directly why Tesla and SpaceX remain separate given how closely they already work together, Musk told hosts at the summit: “Great question there. With all this collaboration, on so many levels, who can imagine what action one might take when there’s so much close collaboration in so many areas.” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who joined Musk on stage, added that SpaceX personnel have already moved into xAI to fill leadership and engineering gaps, saying the businesses are integrating “faster than I thought,” though “not fully integrated yet,”
The comments landed on top of merger speculation that has been building on Wall Street for months. JPMorgan has called a tie-up “strategically coherent on paper,” pointing to overlapping ambitions in AI, robotics, energy, transportation and space. Jefferies went further, estimating Musk could retain roughly 55.3 percent voting control in a deal structured without a premium, a scenario that would still leave room for Tesla shareholders to come out ahead. On Kalshi, traders now put the odds of a merger before 2028 at 66 percent.
Tesla’s stake in SpaceX, still under one percent, traces back to its earlier investment in xAI, which converted to SpaceX equity after SpaceX absorbed the AI company. The two are also jointly building Terafab, a chip facility in Austin meant to serve both Tesla’s AI computing needs and SpaceX’s satellite ambitions. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has stood by a 2027 merger timeline for months, and Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest recently floated a similar case, an idea Musk pushed back on directly at the time.
Another Tesla SpaceX merger prediction by ARK Invest has Elon Musk talking
The timing adds another layer. Tesla has scheduled an October 1 unveiling for its next generation Roadster at a venue near SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas test site, using the phrase “Go for launch” in its promotional material. Both stocks dipped roughly 2 percent Monday before recovering slightly in premarket trading Tuesday, with SpaceX shares up about 0.4 percent and Tesla essentially flat.
Musk stopped short of confirming anything is in motion. But unlike his past denials of a corporate restructuring, this response didn’t rule one out, and it came with Shotwell sitting next to him describing an integration that’s already underway.
The Tesla Roadster unveiling is getting hyped up by the company’s CEO Elon Musk, who has been a big reason the product has such high expectations due to delayed timelines and a constant need to make it even more insane than before.
Tesla announced on September 12 that it would officially unveil the Roadster in Waco, Texas, on October 1, ending years of patience for fans and reservation holders who have waited for the all-electric supercar to enter production since 2017.
Musk has said that this event will be well worth the wait on several occasions, and last year on the Joe Rogan Experience, he said that there should be a closing chapter to supercars- the end of cars that aren’t focused on safety.
He said:
“Whether it’s good or bad, it will be unforgettable. My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars. I think if Peter wants a flying car, he should be able to buy one. I think it has a shot at being the most memorable product unveil ever. This is some crazy technology in this car. Let’s just put it this way: if you took all the James Bond cars and combined them, it’s crazier than that.”
Musk’s teases have continued, and now that the event is roughly two weeks away, it seems like Roadster is finally going to show up and blow some minds:
It’s out of this world
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2026
Excitement guaranteed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2026
Tesla has definitely dragged out the development of the Roadster, but there is a good reason for it.
Tesla has been working on many other projects, most notably self-driving efforts to increase passenger safety, and those simply took priority over the Roadster, a low-volume, high-performance sports car that has a lightning-fast acceleration rate of 0-60 MPH in just 1.1 seconds, could potentially fly, and contributes very little to the company’s mission.
However, many people have the Roadster on pre-order through the referral program or with their own money, and it is time that Tesla delivers on that.
SpaceX’s next Starship launch is about to attempt its biggest leap yet
Elon Musk gives his most telling Tesla-SpaceX merger conversation yet
