Elon Musk sets the record straight on Tesla's founding
Key points
Key takeaways from the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley interview with Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, recorded at Gigafactory Texas (June 2022) — part one of three on the company's early days:
Founding story. Musk traces Tesla to a 2003 lunch with JB Straubel in El Segundo and a test drive of the AC Propulsion tzero; when AC Propulsion declined to commercialise the car, he met Martin Eberhard and Ian Wright, who held an empty shell company with no employees, offices, designs or IP — 'literally nothing' — and he says that had he not met them he would have started the company with Straubel anyway, and it would be indistinguishable from Tesla today.
On Eberhard. Musk accuses Eberhard of a 'non-stop campaign' to claim credit for Tesla, calling him 'the worst person I have ever worked with'; after about a year of friction between Eberhard and Wright, Musk — on Straubel's advice — kept Eberhard and Wright left.
Range as the only constraint. Musk says he has thought about electric cars since high school; his view is that range was the only thing holding EVs back, and that internal combustion will one day look as 'quaint' as steam engines do today. He also notes the money he put in was 'the least important thing' he provided, because there was no company when he joined.
The energy-density ladder. He traces battery progress in range terms: lead-acid packs give optimistically 70–80 miles, nickel-metal hydride roughly 160 miles, and lithium-ion 300-plus miles at the same weight — about four times lead-acid's density, five times with advanced chemistries.
Silicon anodes. Musk explains that adding silicon to the carbon anode boosts energy density, but silicon expands and contracts heavily on charge and discharge and wants to crumble; Tesla's highest-density cells use roughly 90% carbon/ 10% silicon by anode weight, at the cost of slightly more early-life range degradation.
Physics-premium cells. Precisely constructed anodes (chemical vapour deposition, printed almost like a circuit board) could reach 50% higher energy density, but the cost makes such cells viable for long-range aircraft rather than cars.
The Stanford plan. Musk says he was set to study material science at Stanford in 1995, focused on energy density and the idea of a solid-state capacitor built with advanced chip-making equipment for very long range; he deferred by asking to return 'when I fail', and his professor predicted he would not hear from him again.
Supply-chain reality. On early production, Musk notes that a car carrying roughly 10,000 unique parts has to 'bat 10,000' — one missing part stops everything — citing everything from blizzards and train derailments to a delivery truck impounded near a shootout that halted model production for three days.
Read more: Elon Musk on the Early Days of Tesla: Interview Part 1 — Tesla Owners Silicon Valley
