Nobody was working on self landing rockets. Nobody was working on electric cars.
We'd be waiting another 10 years for what we have today.
We'd be waiting another 10 years for what we have today.
Thats just plain wrong
I mean...it's hard to prove a negative, but just to mention one of the tens of critical moments along the way, I have a hard time seeing how someone less ruthless than Musk would have saved them from bankruptcy in 2008.
Another obvious juncture was the whole thing about building a battery factory costing more than the company's market cap a few years prior, doubling the world's battery production capacity...
Musk simply led all funding rounds up to series C, was employee number 4, chairman of the board and took an extremely active role in the company before becoming the CEO. He and the first five employees are "co-founders" agreed to in court by Eberhard which is the one of the guys you are talking about.
A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five (Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk and Straubel) to call themselves co-founders.[11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.#The_beg...
I absolutely agree he has been instrumental to Tesla’s success since he joined as employee number 4 and then took over, but he didn’t start the company and the statement that nobody was interested in or working on electric cars is factually untrue though nobody else managed to bring them to the mass market before Musk.
Do you think Tesla would be where it's at today if Musk didn't get involved? How many times did Tesla almost die?
If you need to me to clarify it: the scale and rate of progress in EV was severely accelerated by Tesla. ICE auto companies had no incentive to develop electric. The space was unprofitable, had many technical challenges.