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Comment by NorwegianDude | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat of topic but:

> Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk

Why do people keep thinking Elon founded Tesla? Pretty sure he wasn't one of the founders, so I don't get why people think so.

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He has done a good job and intentional job of making it seem like he was - and both original founders left soon after he started making active moves as an investor.

I've been a big fan but this series of videos is tempering my understanding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-FGwDDc-s8

Because he retroactively sued the founders and got himself named a founder, he was an early investor but uninvolved I. The first prototype.

Actually this is not the correct sentiment. Elon musk was definitely responsible for the design decisions and success of roadster+ and what tesla ended up being. The early prototype didn’t really have anything super novel and the roadster and other cars weren’t like, a ripoff or remix of whatever prototypes they had. It was a company that was generally setting out to take advantage of high voltage high current switching that had only become possible recently for driving AC motors with duty cycle variation.

The label “founder” is definitely not misplaced. But I suppose it’s a matter of semantics.

Wow, people really dislike this comment even though they can’t offer a substantive counterpoint.

There were two founders originally, Eberhard and Tarpenning. Musk was just a investor.

After Eberhard left he sued Tesla for trying to rewrite history. Then he settled with agreement that Musk and two others (Straubel and Wright) were added to the list of founders. Money solves these things. Now Musk is now officially a Founder.

Either you are a founder, or you're not. It can't be changed, the same way we can't change who was the first man on the moon. Musk isn't a founder of Tesla, and that also means that he'll never be the founder of tesla.

Because he calls himself a founder and Tesla calls him a founder. Basically a Ray Kroc situation.

The founder sued him for it. The result of the lawsuit leaves him as a co-founder legally

when he invested, he was granted the title of both ceo and co-founder, even though the company was already 4 or 5 years old iirc

https://www.tesla.com/elon-musk

That page is "fake news". Musk didn't found Tesla, that's the whole point.

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