Make me a million dollar idea tv show6/21/2023 ![]() She had helped him get clean, and around 2002, in a little garage on a Martinez backstreet, they opened an independent repair shop called Roverland USA. His luck seemed to turn after he married Paulette Amato, his high-school sweetheart. “I was getting phone calls threatening me because he owed money,” Rosalie said. Jeff had a meth addiction, which made things worse, and soon he was selling the drug to pay debts to dealers, he told people. For fun, he popped wheelies in his truck in the Alhambra High School parking lot, splattering mud on teachers’ cars.Īfter graduation, state officials rapped him for mishandling hazardous materials at a garage he’d opened, his father said. As a boy, he polished used tires for 10 cents apiece, fixed junk cars, and stocked shelves at the corner liquor mart. (She and his dad, Ken, divorced when Jeff was 3.) But Jeff couldn’t wait to make money of his own. Rosalie worked three jobs to support Jeff and his older sister. ![]() ![]() But her son was always a storyteller, she told me, prone to embellishment “to make people feel sorry for him or laugh.” “Fights, stabbings, shootings, prostitution-all kinds of just really crazy stuff.” Jeff’s mother, Rosalie, remembered the bar as at worst a little noisy. “We seen things as a kid that a kid just shouldn’t see,” he recalled in footage that DC Solar’s videographer, Steve Beal, played for me. “All the way to the top.”Ĭarpoff had lived almost his whole life in the small city of Martinez, on Northern California’s industrial Carquinez Strait-“the place,” he liked to joke, “where the sewer meets the sea.” His childhood home, about a mile from the city’s Shell Oil refinery, overlooked a biker bar, which Carpoff described as a hangout for marauding Hell’s Angels. “Fill that fucker up,” he said as an executive poured him a glass of Herradura Silver, with a stack of limes on the side. Onstage at a company Christmas party, as he neared the peak of his spectacular ascent, Carpoff celebrated the way he often did: with another tequila. His invention, he thought, was “crazy, harebrained.” But investors saw the makings of a clean-energy revolution. Sales would eventually top $2.5 billion, enough for Carpoff to fly by private jet and purchase a baseball team, more than a dozen houses, and a collection of muscle cars looked after by a guy named Bubba. magazine would call his company, DC Solar, a “renewable energy powerhouse” with a product “people clearly needed.” The Obama administration would make DC Solar a partner-alongside Amazon, Alphabet, and AT&T-in a national program to enlist tech in the fight against climate change. Bank, Progressive Insurance, and Geico would buy thousands of Carpoff’s generators. Over the next eight years, blue-chip corporations such as U.S. The millions of dollars in that first deal were like the drips before a downpour. That’s how Carpoff told the story of the day his life changed. In March 2011, he was singing the national anthem at a local baseball game when he got a text that he’d made his first major sale: The paint company Sherwin-Williams had bought 192 of his generators, for nearly $29 million. The design was so simple that it was a wonder no one seemed to have thought of it before.Ĭarpoff was a paunchy man with blue eyes and apple cheeks-a “big chipmunk,” as a colleague called him-who gulped rather than spit his chewing tobacco and spent Sundays watching NASCAR. But diesel generators ate the ozone layer warmed the planet and caused smog, acid rain, and possibly cancer, on top of their noise, smell, and fuel cost.Ĭarpoff’s machine-a solar generator on wheels-was a sun-fueled alternative. It kept equipment running and lights on at construction sites, outdoor events, movie sets, disaster zones. His invention, he thought, was “crazy, harebrained.” But investors saw the makings of a clean-energy revolution.įor decades, there was basically one way to rush power to places without electricity: the portable diesel generator. ![]() He’d never gone to college and had no experience in green technology. A contraption he’d rigged up in his driveway-a car trailer decked with solar panels and a heavy battery-got the attention of people with real money. ![]() Yet there, at his life’s lowest, the remarkable happened. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. ![]()
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