[Alpha3031]

The rocket company is probably more technically impressive anyway but I am disinclined to accept the attempts to rewrite Tesla's history. Maybe it was necessary to force the actual people who started the company out for it to survive and a Series A is certainly important, but Musk is still an investor in the car company and not the person who started it.

[FeloniousHam]

I don't disagree, and most of what I know about Tesla early history comes from the Isaacson biography, but: it seems pretty clear the "actual" founders would never have been able to clear the hurdle of scale production without him. It wasn't just the funding (which would have been hard to come by), it's really hard to build a large, real-things-in-the-world industrial company from scratch, doubly so for something as complex as a car with all the complexities supply chains, regulations, literal factory construction require.

All glory to the guys who started the company (I love my Tesla Y), but I don't believe it would have gone anywhere without Musk.

(I was add something about Stacy Munro and the auto industry, but I'll just link to his first teardown of the Model 3[1].)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpCrkO1x-Qo

[Alpha3031]

Sure, I don't doubt that Tesla, Inc probably could have bankrupted itself without really producing anything at scale if Eberhard didn't get forced out, especially given the GFC happening at the same time, and it really sucks that legacy automakers weren't willing to sell the EVs they were perfectly capable of designing producing at the time, even if they were forced to, until someone else did it and showed there was a market for it. I still find the hype around Musk bothersome though.