Technology @lemmy.world 4realz @lemmy.world 7mo ago

Five People Founded Tesla, But Only Elon Musk Became Extremely Rich

open.substack.com Five People Founded Tesla, But Only Elon Musk Became Extremely Rich

The untold story of Tesla’s unlucky co-founders and how they missed the billionaire bus

56 comments

Mush didn't found Tesla. He bought it later and put in the contract that he was able to call himself a founder
- Or it could be said that he found Tesla in the "finders keepers" sense.
  
  My brain now can't unsee how stupid the word Founded looks next to found.
  
  He didn't found it, he found it.
  
  👍 the English language is great
- Exactly, but "technically" he is credited as a founder. He's a really good business man.
  
  He isn't a "really good business man", everything he's made is built on a foundation of lies. Eventually, it'll collapse or be saved by socialised systems for being too big to fail. Musk is a con man, not a businessman. He's just made a living out of conning investors and the public alike.
  
  I think the whole Twitter debacle has disproven that he's a good businessman. Rather, it highlights how far one can get by having heritable wealth and being in the right place at the right time.
  
  Being credited as something doesn't mean you are that something. My ex credited me for having a big penis.
  
  Elon is not a founder of Tesla, no matter what any documents say. Calling him such when you know he isn't makes you a liar, a fool or a co-conspirator.
  
  He's successful in spite of himself. He makes terrible decisions constantly.
Tesla only had two founders, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. They even write that in the first paragraph. Especially Elon Musk pretty much bought himself the title co-founder despite joining much later. This is just Elon fanboyism.
- That's business... Martin and Marc didn't take Tesla to $600 billion, Elon did.
  
  My dude, wake up. Elon is mediocre, he was just born rich, heir to precious stone mines with questionable work ethics. You can say he is good at buying things but that's it. Read more about him from people who aren't fans and you will understand.
  
  That's great, it's still not what founding means.
  
  He did nothing. The engineers did design and built the cars. He was just standing on stages, telling lies to investors. It's very rare that c-level actually had something to do with the success of a company.
"Unlucky cofounders" - the lowest net worth of any of them is 7 million. Ian's not doing half bad considering most people will work their entire lives and not get a net worth even half of his.

The next one up has a net worth of 200 million.
This seems extremely poorly researched.
- Howso?
I was never interested in following up claims that Musk was not a founder, but to the extent this article is fair, I’d say he earned the title of founder as well as being the wealthiest. Maybe he was the only one who could afford to go all in on Tesla, but the fact is he went all in on Tesla and put arguably the most into building it into a car manufacturer

And they all look extremely rich to me. Even the “poorest” of the group made $7M for one year
- 7 million is "retiring doctor" or "retiring Google engineer" rich.
  
  It's generally considered safe to withdraw 4% of your nest egg the first year, and adjust that for inflation moving forwards. $7 million can sustain a $280k/year retirement. That's certainly rich, but there's a world of difference between that and a billionaire. A billionaire can safely spend $40 million a year.
“I made this!”

56 comments