Liam Denning, Columnist

Cost Control Costs SolarCity Dearly

It's looking less like a unicorn and more like a horse.

October 30, 2015 at 6:53 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

A SolarCity employee.
Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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A unicorn turning into a horse sounds like a twisted fairy tale. Instead, it’s what just happened to SolarCity.

Roughly a quarter of the solar-power leasing company’s value was wiped out Friday on the back of results released the previous afternoon. The earnings numbers, as usual with SolarCity, aren’t the main thing here (its loss was bigger than expected, just for the record). The bigger deal was this: