[Retric]

I’m wondering under what definition he “founded” Tesla rather than being the investor who took it over years later kicking the founders out?

I’d give him SpaceX, but it definitely did better when he was paying less attention to it.

[ben_w]

> I’m wondering under what definition he “founded” Tesla rather than being the investor who took it over years later kicking the founders out?

I wouldn't call him a founder precisely because of this, but at the same time they produced, I forget the exact number, but less than 200 individual vehicles before he took over.

The company was seen as a financial disaster, a pipe dream, and a money sink for a very long time, and he did actually make it profitable.

(Although, given he's ranted about the difficulties of being a public company and having to listen to shareholders, I'm not sure how much this happened because of him rather than despite him).

[BoiledCabbage]

> The company was seen as a financial disaster, a pipe dream, and a money sink for a very long time, and he did actually make it profitable.

Pretty much mainly on government money - without it, it would've gone bust long ago. Specifically the policies of Obama and those pesk environmentalists he seems to dislike so much.

[ben_w]

Probably, but making a sucessful transition to eco-friendly vehicles was the point of that government money, and at the time batteries were much more expensive.

(The price of batteries is also why, at the time he went for batteries, the zeitgeist was hydrogen).

[Retric]

The founders who went for batteries were all about heavy acceleration at the time, which Hydrogen couldn’t really do.

He took over 5 years in when they already had the Roadster in production and the model S design was largely finalized with the goal of ever cheaper and more mass market cars over time.

The cyber truck’s look and buying solar city were definitely under his leadership, other moves are less clear.

[ben_w]

Cybertruck seems to represent him making all the same fundamental mistakes that were present in the original design of the Roadster, by being too expensive to produce. (Compare the price as announced vs. as delivered, and that's not justifiable by inflation).

The reports I've seen say Musk took an active role within the company starting in 2004 (Eberhard was asked to leave in 2007), including overseeing Roadster product design from the beginning (but I've not seen citations for this), and was behind the idea of using the sports car to fund the development of mainstream vehicles.

As I understand it, the first Roadster to be delivered was to Musk and in Feb 2008? So between Eberhard and Musk as CEO.

The best I can do for citations is this, but this is Musk writing on Tesla's blog — I would like to say crucially the date stamp is before Eberhard was pushed out in 2007… but the oldest archive copy is 2010 not 2006 when the blog post claims to have been written, and when the guy himself has a trust deficit I think it's worth being open about this discrepancy: https://web.archive.org/web/20100802142703/http://www.teslam...

(I also found this, which doesn't add much, but does show that Musk overpromising and people calling BS is a constant over time: https://web.archive.org/web/20111125032325/http://gigaom.com...)

[mattmaroon]

Among other things, the terms of a legal settlement with the other people who "founded" it.

[Retric]

So him paying people somehow changes what happened?

“In 2009, Eberhard filed a lawsuit against Musk for slander and libel. As per NBC Bay Area, the lawsuit was settled, and as a condition of the settlement, Musk and two other Tesla executives, JB Straubel and Ian Wright, are now allowed to call themselves co-founders, in addition to Eberhard and Tarpenning.”

He had zero involvement for ~1 year, invested some money and then five years later he’s CEO. That’s hardly the definition of founding anything.

[fencepost]

I wonder how much each company spends internally on damage control/mitigation re: Musk. I don't think he's as much of a chaos monkey as Trump, but I try not to pay attention to him so I could be missing things.

[stevenAthompson]

He is 100% of the reason I do not drive a Tesla today. I'm not the only person who feels this way.

If he buys OpenAI he will be 100% of the reason I don't use it.