[marvin]

You figure Tesla would be the in the world's top 10 companies by market cap today if Musk hadn't invested and run it, and the company was still run my Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard?

I mean...it's hard to prove a negative, but just to mention one of the tens of critical moments along the way, I have a hard time seeing how someone less ruthless than Musk would have saved them from bankruptcy in 2008.

Another obvious juncture was the whole thing about building a battery factory costing more than the company's market cap a few years prior, doubling the world's battery production capacity...

[grey-area]

No, I don’t, but I also don’t really consider him a founder, nor was he the first to have any interest in electric cars (as the OP intimated).