Can Elon Musk’s Cousin Do for Solar Power What Tesla Has Done for Cars?

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the Slate website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In 2004, Lyndon Rive was in an RV on his way to Burning Man when his cousin gave him five words of advice: “You should look into solar.” The way Rive tells it, it sounds a little like Mr. McGuire in The Graduate telling Dustin Hoffman to think about plastics.

Except that Rive’s cousin is Elon Musk. And Musk’s runic advice has led to a $5 billion business that is reshaping how Americans get their electricity.

Just 27 at the time of that RV ride, Rive was already the co-founder and chief executive of a Silicon Valley information-technology business, Everdream, which sold desktop management services to small businesses. It was flourishing, but Rive felt unfulfilled. “I just had this bug I had to address, which is that we have to change the way we burn fossil fuels,” he says over coffee in Manhattan this past summer. “We just have to.” The intensity with which he states this is startling.