For most people, Tesla is inseparable from the name Elon Musk. In fact, the billionaire has been associated with the automaker for a very long time, becoming chairman of the board in 2004 and now CEO. But the company was founded in 2003 by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.
Eberhard left the company in 2007 after a falling out with Musk. The founder apparently no longer wants to have anything to do with Elon Musk. He blocked Musk from his news feed, he explained in an interview with “Business Insider”: “I don’t have to read anything about him anymore. It just gives me a stomach ache to read news about him.” Nevertheless, the 62-year-old can’t help but notice that his former companion has changed: “Elon is a different person now than he was then.”
The billionaire, long the richest man in the world, is now much more involved in the operational business of his company. Musk is now “a super active guy,” Eberhard observed. It used to be different: “He didn’t come there regularly and didn’t give my employees any instructions or anything like that. He was just a member of the board.” That only changed when media interest in Tesla grew.
His employees suffer from the fact that Musk often and willingly interferes. Musk is notorious for his sometimes dubious leadership methods, employees report unpredictable outbursts of anger, layoffs are the order of the day – as is currently the case with the short message service Twitter, which Musk took over last year. Eberhard criticizes this behavior sharply: “I believe that employees should be treated with respect, and I have nothing left for random layoffs and things like that.” At Tesla, he himself tried to show the employees “that what we do is really important for the world. And that motivated people to invest many, many hard hours – but not not out of fear, but out of a sense of accomplishment and a sense of responsibility.”
Eberhard and Musk had fallen out after a few years of working together. Today’s Tesla boss ensured that Eberhard was fired as CEO because he was allegedly stopping the production of Tesla’s first car, the Roadster. Musk also described himself as the founder of Tesla Eberhard then sued him, the dispute ended with a settlement. Part of this was that Musk was also able to claim the title of Tesla founder.
It is therefore not surprising that Eberhard is still in bad spirits – especially when it comes to the question of founding the company. In his view, Musk “for years tried to portray history as being the founder of Tesla.” Although Musk led the highly successful Series A funding round, he only joined the company in 2004.
There is no longer any contact between the two Tesla pioneers: Eberhard says they have not spoken to each other since their legal dispute. Musk just tweeted disparagingly about him a few more times: “My therapist said to me, ‘What you can get from all of this is that you’re still bugging him, so if he bugs you back, at least you’re even.’ Like I said, I’m relatively powerless in that regard and there’s not much I can do. I just accept it.”
Sources: “Business Insider” / “Wired”
