What % of the MONEY was wasted?
IOW, if you give $1000 to each of 1000 companies and they all succeed, and $100,000,000 to one and that one fails, %-wise you look pretty good, but money-wise you look pretty poor.

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1982 300SD " Wotan" ..On the road as of Jan 8, 2007 with Historic Tags

From the 2nd link:

The US government guarantee of a private loan to Solyndra, at $535 million, represented a minuscule 1.4% of the Department of Energy investment in all renewable technologies. By contrast – VCs (who were out $1 billion to Solyndra, for example) expect much higher failure rates. Richard Stuebi, who advises VCs on expected green energy failure rates, says that just 3 in 10 successes represents a successful VC investment strategy. That is 70% losers – not 1.4%.
Clean Technica (Obama DOE Picked More Energy Winners Than Silicon Valley VCs - CleanTechnica)
Read more at Obama DOE Picked More Energy Winners Than Silicon Valley VCs - CleanTechnica


I'm actually not sure about those numbers, $500 million is more like 0.5% of 90 billion, but they don't mention how they calculate their percentage.

It is interesting to note the difference in the rate between government and VC investments. I suppose government should run at a 0% failure rate.