Bloom Energy history

Subsequent board documents show hot boxes cost $5,000 at the beginning of 2008 and $3,500 at the end of 2008.

By 2008, Sridhar had installed Bloom’s first boxes at Google, where Doerr is a longtime board member.

For example, some prospective investors in 2009 were shown a "Google customer testimonial" that claimed the search giant had experienced only a single equipment failure that was quickly fixed.

Bloom insists it did sell some power that cheap, but only after applying generous subsidies and operating at a loss. (A Kleiner Perkins spokesperson says it’s common to sell at a loss to build market share.) It confirms its unsubsidized cost in 2010 was 19 cents per kwh.

Board documents show that Bloom was gross margin negative for 2012, despite hitting 1% gross margin positive for Q2 2012 and Q4 2012.

As a further slight, Sridhar promised 900 jobs at its Delaware plant in 2012, but so far only 340 of those have materialized.

When in 2014 regulators started asking more questions, Bloom disclosed that its filtration systems caught a host of nasties like arsenic, benzene, sulfur and lead.

In 2014, the brokers settled for $16.7 million, much of it in warrants (the right to purchase shares), if and when Bloom went public.

Bloom went public in July 2018 at $15 per share, with its stock popping 30% on its first day of trading.

On July 25, 2018, the day of Bloom’s IPO, Sridhar falsely told MarketWatch reporters that the company was profitable as of the second quarter.

Shares are down nearly 50% since Bloom raised $282 million in its 2018 IPO. And now regulators and even local politicians are clashing with the company.