Five People Founded Tesla, But Only Elon Musk Became Extremely Rich

4realz@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 311 points –
Five People Founded Tesla, But Only Elon Musk Became Extremely Rich
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Mush didn't found Tesla. He bought it later and put in the contract that he was able to call himself a founder

Or it could be said that he found Tesla in the "finders keepers" sense.

My brain now can't unsee how stupid the word Founded looks next to found.

Is it shaking your entire foundation?

He didn't found it, he found it.

👍 the English language is great

Exactly, but "technically" he is credited as a founder. He's a really good business man.

He isn't a "really good business man", everything he's made is built on a foundation of lies. Eventually, it'll collapse or be saved by socialised systems for being too big to fail. Musk is a con man, not a businessman. He's just made a living out of conning investors and the public alike.

I don't know, it sounds like the definition of a business man. Not one I'd admire, but not unlike lots of other business men.

No, businessmen do business. Steve Jobs did business, he figured out markets, created markets based on what his business could provide. That's actual business.

A grifter, a con man, is not a business man, they wear the skin of one to fool people like yourself into buying into the con. Looks like it works.

Steve Jobs also conspired with his competitors to underpay their staff. Staff as in the people that helped him do business and make billions

created markets based on what his business could provide.

As much as I loathe musk, this is exactly what Starlink is. It's a company founded solely to buy the product SpaceX is making, because other people couldn't buy enough.

Of course, Starlink is floating almost entirely on venture capital, but that's how Amazon got started too.

Here's the rub. Starlink is not and can not be profitable without venture capital and subsidies. It exists to funnel money away from taxpayers. It's a con built on lies like the rest. At least some people get to benefit from this, unlike people sold overhyped cars and promises of Mars colonies, but that's changing with price hikes and service degredations too.

can I get a source on the math for this? I haven't heard that before

What math do you want? The cost of launching infinite space ships forever is more than what subscribers pay. The satellites fall down in about a year and new ones need to be launched. The subscribers would have to pay for every single rocket launch. Right now American tax payers do.

The problem is you say this with certainty but have no numbers or evidence to back it up. How do you know the revenue from subscribers can't cover rocket launches?

It got almost a billion dollars in subsidies from America last year. This is whilst being unprofitable.

It seems Starlink A) isn't getting subsidies and SpaceX is B) providing services in exchange for payment rather than just getting free money.

On top of this, SpaceX is reportedly still profitable. I just don't understand your argument here. No sources, no actual hard data just conjecture.

My evil, greedy and manipulative capitalist is better than your evil, greedy and manipulative capitalist!!!!

My point is that one is a greedy, evil businessman. The other is a greedy, evil conman.

But only if you draw a very careful line around definitions, what musk does is very standard capitalist business and what jobs did is very much the behaviour of a classic conman. Apples whole business strategy is straight out the carnival con artist playbook, you'll find all the same tricks at any market stall

I think it was sarcasm.

He isn't a "really good business man"

I find it absolutely hilarious that literally anyone thinks one of the wealthiest people in the world "isn't a good business man". Like how completely proposterous is that?

It just speaks the the absolute bias of people who don't like him and can't possibly say anything that might be poorly construed as positive.

I think that the criticism is that our system does not raise the smartest or the best to the top.

I understand where you're coming from, but business is brutal and things like this happen in that world. PayPal (formely X .com) was also started by Elon, I don't think he "scammed/tricked" anyone on that. And he has made billions for his investors over the years. I mean Tesla is worth over $600 billion, due to the marketing genius that is Elon. [Mistake: Elon didn't start PayPal, just X .com]

Man, learn something about someone before you go worshipping them.

X was bought by paypal, but was far from "integral." It was just its largest competitor for Confinidy at the time because Musk was washing it in money he made from a previous venture.Paypal was the more popular money transfer software, and it's the platform the new company formed around, even taking its name.

Musk was a actually briefly the CEO of PayPal, but his decisions were so poor that he was forced out.. He still retained enough shares of paypal to hit it big time, which is when he poured all that money into a long shot bet called Tesla, which he used goverment funds and seed capitol from his rich friends to keep alive until it turned an actual profit a decade later. With SpaceX, he leaned into fanboys like you calling him Tony stark, and managed to hire Gwynne Shotwell, a goddamn aeronautics powerhouse, as CEO the same year it was founded. She has brought SpaceX to success, by all accounts in spite of him. Its rumored that SpaceX keeps people around just to sideline Musk. That how disruptive he is to actual work. SpaceX was also utterly dependent on goverment subsides for most its existence, just like Tesla.

Dude grew up with emerald mine money, then just kept taking outlandish risks because he had an emerald mine to keep his ass housed and fed, and yeah, eventually hit it big, with a big heaping of help from our tax dollars and mega rich pals. Big surprise.

Turns out that if you have a wealthy life secured, you too can gamble big and make even more money. Thats how capitalism is designed to work. Capital makes more capital.

The fact that you're suckered in by the worlds luckiest gambler playing a game that had no actual stakes for him is sad as fuck man. Be proud of someone who overcame actual adversity. Go find a hero that wants to help people, not to rule them.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I'll have to do some more research on Elon then.

Don't forget blatant market manipulation. Pump&dumps on Bitcoin, doge coin, TWTR, and TSLA...

I still don't get the emerald mine money bit. Even snopes ran on it that the perpetuated story is bogus, with properly cited sources on where the whole comment originated from.

I think Musk is a grifter, but let's stick to facts instead of hearsay.

Edit: for those asking:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-mine/

Could you link that source? I can’t find it

here it is. The whole thing seems rather murky and somewhat shady too. The most specific statement on it is this:

Arnold's story included answers from Errol about the mine, who said he had "very limited involvement" in it. Arnold paraphrased his answers, publishing that he said "it was a handshake deal with a Panamanian man that resulted in something like 110 emeralds up front and then a semi-regular trickle of rough stones over a few years following," and that "there was never formal ownership."

The wealth earned from the investment in the mine was quantified to be about $400,000 USD, taking into account inflation when Arnold's piece was written in 2021, according to Errol. "Errol also quoted a lower number to me over the phone," Arnold wrote. "He also claims he was getting emeralds from other sources, with only 60-70% coming from this venture."

So maybe not a whole emerald mine, but like an unofficial small stake in an emerald mine? Still, 400k ain't bad at all for a handshake deal.

Yeah, I don’t buy it. Rich people lie and hide their money all the time.

He didn’t start PayPal. It was founded by Pieter Thiel, another billionaire christofascist, and four other guys and non of them are called Elon Musk. X.com was bought by PayPal.

It's wild how little this dude knows about Elon musk while singing his praises to the heavens, but I guess those two things go hand in hand.

Muskrats are always the least informed people in the room when it concerns Elon Musk. It'd be a lot funnier if it weren't so damn easy to find the actual facts. There's really no excusing it, they're just willfully ignorant.

"Oh yeah he didn't actually do that.. Still, what a genius amirite?"

I think the whole Twitter debacle has disproven that he's a good businessman. Rather, it highlights how far one can get by having heritable wealth and being in the right place at the right time.

He's successful in spite of himself. He makes terrible decisions constantly.

He seems like the avatar of the concept that rich people are not allowed to fail in society, no matter how hard they try. Once you reach a certain size, there will always be an army of people around them to hold them up. You just sit at the top and everyone under you needs you to succeed otherwise they're also fucked.

Musk is too big to fail.

I guess when you have enough money you get to try enough times that you accidentally make good choices sometimes. Or people just think he's smart because he's rich.

Being credited as something doesn't mean you are that something. My ex credited me for having a big penis.

Elon is not a founder of Tesla, no matter what any documents say. Calling him such when you know he isn't makes you a liar, a fool or a co-conspirator.

Now I am laughing because I am imagining you working the big penis anecdote into every comment and conversation.

That would be a funny bit.

And this isn't even right, 2 people founded Tesla the other 3 are investors....

Careful, Musk might send the internet goon squad after you for saying that. He gets very upset if you call him an investor in Tesla.

Starlink is trash too, come at me Elon

Starlink is shitty and yet where I'm at its still easily the cheapest, fastest, and most reliable option. Infuriating really.

Yeah, if he spent the money on laying fibre instead of using satilites that need to be replaced every at most 18 months and as little as 2 months, everyone would have been better off.

Yeah and if my province hadn't sold of their public telephone company to private investors I'd be even more better off so I'm more pissed about that.

Gotta love when rich people convince our politicians that they can do the job better than the Govt and then we loose everything. Like when Brian M sold off CN Rail now Bill Gates is making billions from it.

Yeah, but he only has the one digger, so the fiber would all end up in hyperloop-sized tunnels, it'd be like the Underminer from the Incredibles.

Prob would still be cheaper and more environmentally friendlier

I see that being said quite often.

Is there any actual proof of this or is it speculation?

In low density population areas, it seems to me that laying fiber would be cost prohibitive, but I'd like to be proven wrong.

Each satellite is worth 250k @ 5,500 units currently (and its still garbage unless its your only option). And this is just the cost of satilites

Worse case scenario for laying fibre is $80,000 for 1 mile

You do the shit maths and that is 17,187.5 miles (not km) of fibre for what is currently in LEO and excluding the price of launching these POS into the nights sky. So for best case senario every 18 months that is how much fibre lines Elon could be laying.

From Presque Isles, Maine to Sandiego, California is 3,305 miles

Excuse me, but one of the conditions of Elon's investment was that they pretend he was a founder and refer to him as such!

It wasn't a condition of his initial investment, but rather of a lawsuit settlement five years later, in 2009 (six years after Eberhard and Tarpenning actually founded it).

Tesla only had two founders, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. They even write that in the first paragraph. Especially Elon Musk pretty much bought himself the title co-founder despite joining much later. This is just Elon fanboyism.

That's business... Martin and Marc didn't take Tesla to $600 billion, Elon did.

Jobs, Wozniak, and Wayne never took apple to $3 trillion or even $1 trillion.

Gates and Allen never took Microsoft to $2.8 trillion or even $1 trillion.

They're all still founders. Musk isn't.

My dude, wake up. Elon is mediocre, he was just born rich, heir to precious stone mines with questionable work ethics. You can say he is good at buying things but that's it. Read more about him from people who aren't fans and you will understand.

Yeah fan boys are dumb but on the same hand I do think there's a lot of obsessive negativity too, people act like he's a bumbling clutz in every aspect of his life but I don't think that's really true either.

He did nothing. The engineers did design and built the cars. He was just standing on stages, telling lies to investors. It's very rare that c-level actually had something to do with the success of a company.

the world’s most valuable automotive company.

Lol no.

I don't like Tesla Elon.

But they are literally the most valuable automotive company.

As of right now, their market cap is $794.33 billion.

Yeah I was a bit surprised. Seems quite clearly over-valued.

By Revenue Tesla is 11th, and by Earnings Tesla is 8th. Market cap is fictional number.

Market cap is absolutely the best metric for the "value" of a company.

If people are willing to pay $X for a share of a company and there are N shares, then the value of the company is $X*N.

The fact that people are buying shares at a certain price says that people think the company is valued at that price.

This reminds me of a funny (probably illegal) thing that Max Fosh did where he made a company with an absurd amount of shares and got some random person to buy a share for $20 or $50 or something so his company temporarily became the richest in the world (technically) lol

It is A metric of the company, best could be argued, absolutely best is stretching it. When company value is based on hype, over promise and lies etc, the market cap becomes less relevant and the revenue/profit are better metrics for valuation.

Theranos was valued at 9B$, just based on hype and lies.

Elon Musk is similar vaporware sales man.

According to the stock market, yes. If you know otherwise, go make some money of them.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

hhahah cuz we know the stock market is all real numbers

Yes? At least people on the stock market are putting up their money instead of just talking.

meh. most of us call it gambling, and the house has the advantage (thats a pun!). lets not kid ourselves that there are real valuations in play here

Weird that people argue about this. If the value of a company is being talked about, then stocks is what people generally refer to. Now, if you'd specify and talk about some other value, then sure, but if only "value" is being mentioned I see no reason to think it would mean something else than stocks.

stocks are unstable and they only provide actual value when sold. Thus, for some, it is at best an imprecise measure. Thus People don't like it and some simply refute the valuation. The fact that it remains the only viable source for valuation is not relevant to them.
Just a different PoV (world view as to what is valuable in life) which is not catered to by the available data.

A big part of trading stocks is assessing value independent of the stock price. You want to buy stock when it is undervalued and sell it when it is overvalued. Tesla seems to be in the latter position, IMO.

It's definitely overvalued, but that's because it's currently valued as the most valuable automotive company on the planet.

"Unlucky cofounders" - the lowest net worth of any of them is 7 million. Ian's not doing half bad considering most people will work their entire lives and not get a net worth even half of his.

The next one up has a net worth of 200 million.

I was never interested in following up claims that Musk was not a founder, but to the extent this article is fair, I’d say he earned the title of founder as well as being the wealthiest. Maybe he was the only one who could afford to go all in on Tesla, but the fact is he went all in on Tesla and put arguably the most into building it into a car manufacturer

And they all look extremely rich to me. Even the “poorest” of the group made $7M for one year

7 million is "retiring doctor" or "retiring Google engineer" rich.

It's generally considered safe to withdraw 4% of your nest egg the first year, and adjust that for inflation moving forwards. $7 million can sustain a $280k/year retirement. That's certainly rich, but there's a world of difference between that and a billionaire. A billionaire can safely spend $40 million a year.