Welcome to Axis ProRata, where we take just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

I'm Dan for Mac. On today's show, Facebook tightens its political ad rules and the rise of strawberry-picking robots.

The first, Elon Musk's power outage.

So when most people think of Elon Musk, they tend to think about Tesla or SpaceX, or maybe

even PayPal, which he founded previously, or even further, maybe Thameshrowers or Robert

Downey Jr.'s Iron Man.

But in upstate New York, Musk is known primarily for promising to pull the region out of its post-steel-making doldrums by pledging to build thousands of solar energy panels per day out of a gleaming white factory in Buffalo, which would employ up to 5,000 people.

But it hasn't really worked out that way, as detailed in a new Vanity Fair piece by Bethany McLean, a veteran business journalist known for helping

to expose the fraud at Enron. The history here is that Tesla, a few years back, bought Solar

City, which had been founded by Musk's cousins in an arguably conflicted deal that remains

the subject of shareholder litigation. Musk then did what Musk does, made huge mouth-watering promises,

getting Buffalo so excited that the state of New York gave him $750 million to build the

new factory, dubbed Gigafactory 2.

Trouble is, Solar City didn't really know how to make solar panels.

It had always bought them elsewhere and then provided installation and consumer financing.

And from what McLean can tell, it still doesn't necessarily know how to do it now, at least

not as well as any rivals, thus creating a giant money suck for Tesla today and a giant headache

for public officials like Governor Andrew Cuomo who championed the factory, which right now

employs fewer than 350 people.

The bottom line is that Buffalo is a long way from Silicon Valley,

where vaporware and reality distortion fields are the norm.

For the city, it's yet another massive disappointment.

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