Elon Musk has probably never been underemployed. He has launched numerous well-known companies, first Zip2 and PayPal in the 1990s, later including SpaceX and the neurotechnology company Neuralink. But it was precisely the brand for which he is best known worldwide, Tesla, that he took over later. Marc Tarpenning and electrical engineer Martin Eberhard launched Tesla in 2003. Especially between Musk and Eberhard there is still thick air today. Musk continues to raise serious allegations against the Tesla creator.
Musk was initially only one of the investors in the electric car manufacturer. The fact that the founding duo said goodbye a few years later is also said to be due to Elon Musk. Martin Eberhard in particular claimed that after his retirement. He even sued his former company in 2009, nagging Musk at charges including defamation, slander and breach of contract.
Since then, the conflicts surrounding the creation of Tesla have popped up again and again on Twitter, until recently. So Musk does not want to see the actual Tesla in Eberhard. Eberhard has been “unshakeably spreading the wrong narrative for 15 years,” he recently explained on Twitter. Eberhard is an “impressive liar” who betrayed Musk “for three years”.
If Eberhard had really been such a great company founder, he could have proved it after his resignation in 2007. In addition, Tesla would have lost “at least a few talented people” with his departure, but no one went with him.
In truth, Tesla was nothing more than a shell company with a business plan and nothing else – no employees, designs or prototypes. Musk was not brought on board by Eberhard as a financier, but by JB Straubel.
Eberhard has remained in the automotive industry since leaving Tesla and continued to be active as a company founder. First he worked as an electric car developer for Volkswagen for two years, then he founded inEVit, a startup that develops electric drive technology for car manufacturers. The company was sold to Seres in 2017, where Eberhard worked as Chief Strategy Officer for around a year. He still invests in startups to this day.
According to his LinkedIn profile, he retired at the beginning of the year.
