From the article: "From then on, we started doing a lot of work with Google," says Majusiak. "We did almost all of their hardware integration. They were just doing software."
Just software? Holy cow. The machine learning, control systems, mapping software, and all the other algorithms in a self-driving car are the really fundamental pieces. It's super important to get the hardware right, and 510 did a great job of that, but the software is the brain.
I was quite surprised by the parent comment because I had never heard of Musk being described as a founder. But then again I've lived in palo alto since before tesla was founded so the power struggle was minor gossip at the time (and was in the mercury news).
What has surprised me is that he is in fact listed as a founder on the wikipedia web site and in fact Tesla litigated over the matter.
Now the word "founder" is weird -- IME A round paperwork typically refers to any common shareholder at the time of venture investment as a "founder". And then there was that bizarre Facebook suit over who could refer to themselves as a company founder. Weird.
I bet if you were to poll people around the world, most people would assume Musk was a founder.
After reading the article on how primates use 'fame' in dominance games that made the rounds here I found that it identified that sort of behavior pretty precisely.
http://www.wired.com/2009/06/eberhard/
https://gigaom.com/2009/06/11/tesla-founder-eberhard-files-l...