Martin Eberhard

So successful, we ordered those 2,500 gliders from Lotus.

In August 2007, Martin Eberhard had to go as CEO.

We had Marks as an interim until November, with DeRory until December 2007.

He made it until Musk took over October of 2008.

You know, the fact was, in the early days of Tesla, Elon Musk... as he says in the film, spent most of his time at SpaceX.

That's really his day job.

And he was approached by two guys, Martin Eberhardt and Mark Tarpenning, who literally founded Tesla.

Eberhardt had come up with this idea for a lithium ion battery pack that would really make cars go fast.

and also had an idea about how you start at the top of the market, the roadster, and then as people adopt, you drive the price down until you have a car that every man could afford.

So I followed up and went over and saw Tesla and I met with J.B. Straubel, the CTO.

I met with several other folks there, Scott Cohn, Gene Bridechevsky, and Martin Eberhard, the CEO.

Met with several people and It was amazing talking to these guys.

They could answer every question I had.

Yeah.

You end up getting that way, developing that skill in the supply chains, by supply chain folks.

So I went there over and over again, and I went there so much that I irritated the heck out of them so that their president wrote to Martin Eberhard, our CEO, and said, can you please make sure that Kurt doesn't come here? We do not want to buy sales from you.

We sell them to you.

The documentary charts Musk's rise from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to the world's richest individual and a key political figure, while scrutinizing the gap between his public promises and actual business realities.

Featuring critical interviews with yet insightful interviews with ex-wife Justine Musk, his trans daughter Vivian Wilson, former business partners like Martin Eberhard, AI pioneer Jeffrey Hinton, tech journalists such as Kara Swisher, and even his estranged father.

The film weaves together personal history, corporate missteps, and geopolitical power to present a complex, unsettling portrait of unbounded executive power and ambition.

So I went to see this immediately after seeing You Can See Everything.

Then they talk about Tesla because that's his big thing, right? Everyone, Elon Musk, the Tesla founder.

And they interviewed the people that actually founded Tesla and, Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning, did you know this? No.

I kind of knew it, but it wasn't cemented to

fact.

And I don't remember what happened, if they settled out of court or something happened.

And the outcome of it is Elon Musk... is now acknowledged as a founder of Tesla because of this lawsuit.

I guess he paid off enough to make that claim and for Martin Eberhard to not dispute it

or something.

If something's a big success, all of a sudden everybody remembers, "Hey, that was my idea," or, "Hey, they stole that idea from me." And so the story is not a one-sentence answer, but it's a pretty fast-moving, I hope, chapter.

Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning having tried to start a company.

They had no money and no employees, but they had the name Tesla that they had registered.

JB Straubel, who was also creating a battery company and trying to do AC propulsion, and then Musk, who puts in the money, puts all these groups together, becomes the chairman, and funds it.

And, and one of the guys even says, "I don't understand.

He's the richest man in the world."

Martin Eberhard.

Martin Eberhard says, "He's the richest man in the world.

And, uh, you tell a different founding story about Tesla than most people, uh, are commonly aware of.

Could you talk about that and his battle with, uh, was it, uh, Martin Eberhard?

Sure.

I mean, it's interesting.

Most people think that Elon Musk is the founder of Tesla, and also the prime inventor Of the technology, uh, uh, at Tesla and, and that just isn't [laughs] true.

He was an investor, not an inventor.

Um, the real inventor was a man named Martin Eberhard.

He and his partner, Marc Tarpenning, founded Tesla.