TESLA BEFORE ELON MUSK
There is a widespread belief that Elon musk founded Tesla. Nothing can be more wrong!
Also, many people who know that Elon Musk isn’t the founder of Tesla don’t even know the origin of Tesla and those responsible for its formative years.
So, who were those responsible?
In 1997, Martin Eberhard had spent a decade working as an electrical engineer, where he first met his future business partner named, Marc Tapening.
They began planning their first venture together, and they founded NuvoMedia, an e-book reader. In three years, they have sold about 20,000 e-book readers, and they sold this company for a comfortable 187 million dollars.
After selling the e-book company, they decided to shift their focus to building electric sports cars.
But why would they make a transition from an e-book to building an electric sports car?
After Martin sold the e-book company, he got divorced, and he wanted to distract himself from the whole situation, and the logical thing was to turn to what he loved — sports car, and that was how a new era was about to be born in the automobile space.
The Birth of Tesla…
Martin approached Marc to work on this project, and together in 2003, they began work on their first sports car which would eventually be called ‘The Roadster’. Instead of relying on the traditional combustion engine, the founders decided to be innovative, using lithium-ion batteries. It was a technology that they had discovered during their e-book days. This was the birth of Tesla.
As we all know, a car manufacturing plant is complicated, and as a result, building everything from scratch will be very tasking. So, they partnered with two companies;
1. AC propulsion, a motor company from California.
2. Lotus, a British car manufacturer.
Tesla struck a deal with AC propulsion to use its motor because they had once manufactured an electric car that was flawlessly successful. Also, the motor needed to be placed in an actual vehicle; this is where lotus cars came in. Lotus cars ticked all the boxes for a sports car, and logically this was the best they could find.
With the partnership deals already successful, Tesla Motors began development in earnest. But unfortunately, by mid-2004, the company was running out of funds. They had bootstrapped with their money for the first year and other generous investors’ money, but it wasn’t just enough to take them further.
Tesla meets Elon Musk..
Then the duo met the legendary Elon Musk. At this period, Elon had just sold PayPal to eBay and was sitting on a pile of cash. When they approached him, the duo had this to say about Elon Musk “we’ve been talking to other investors, but they’ve been saying what we are building is impossible and ridiculous, but when we met Elon Musk the moment we presented our idea to him and what we are building he understood us instantly and invested almost instantly “.
Elon Musk invested 7.5 million dollars into Tesla after meeting with the founders. He will still later invest 70 million dollars into Tesla by 2008. This lump investment made Elon become the chairman of the board. As a result, Tesla made a great leap such that by November of 2004, they released their prototype, which was a lotus car that was outfitted with AC propulsion technology. It was a great prototype when they released it, and it got the attention of the masses.
Tesla continued to improve the prototype for another two years, and finally, on July 19th of, 2008, ‘ The Roadster’ was unveiled in Santa Monica. This sports car cost a whopping $109,000. Within two weeks of ‘The roadsters’ debut, Tesla had sold 127 cars.
Things happened to be glittering outside as Tesla was making sales, but it wasn’t the same inside. There were rumours that tensions were building between Martin and Elon for reasons that we don’t know and were never revealed by any of them.
How did Elon become CEO?
However, by August 2007, Martin got a call from Elon Musk and informed him that the board met without him, and they decided that Martin step down as CEO, and Elon took over as the fourth CEO of Tesla.
Martin would later say in an interview with CNBC, “I was voted off the island in a rather rude way”, and in the January of the year that followed the incident, Mark also stepped down.
When Martin was voted off the island, as he usually says, he sued Elon, but Elon filed a counter case and what was known was that Martin dropped charges, and they both settled out of court.
However, both Martin Eberhard and Marc Tappening are still shareholders in Tesla, and they have mutual respect for Elon Musk, but they don’t communicate.
Much respect for both Martin Eberhard and Marc Tappening!
