10 Facts You Didn't Know About Tesla Motors & Elon Musk (Maybe)

[JuliaB]

Who is Elon Musk and What is Tesla?

Elon Musk is a South African-born Canadian-American business magnate, investor, engineer and inventor. Basically he's a real-life Iron-Man (without the suit... as far as we know). Musk started out his road to stardom in 1995, when he and brother Kimbal started up a web software company known as Zip2. The company developed and marketed an Internet "city guide" for the newspaper industry. The company was acquired by Compaq for around $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options in 1999, of this Musk received around 7% ($22 million). Using his new found fame and fortune, Musk then co-founded X.com, one year after co-founding the company, it merged with Confinity, which had a money transfer service known as PayPal. eBay then acquired PayPal in 2002, for an astounding $1.5 billion in stock. Musk received $165 million (before the sale of PayPal, musk was the largest shareholder owning 11.7% of PayPal shares). Musk could have retired at the age of 32 and lived out his life in peace, instead he decided to focus on space exploration, conceptualising "Mars Oasis", a project aiming to land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars. Using $100 million of his fortune, he founded Space Exploration Technologies (Known as SpaceX) in June 2002. Musk is most well known for his work with Tesla Motors, the American automaker and energy storage company, originally founded by Martin Eberhard & Marc Taroenning. It wasn't until one year after the founding of Tesla that Musk appeared. Elon joined the company as Board of Directors chairman after leading the Series A round of investment in February 2004. After a financial crisis in 2008, Elon stepped in and assumed leadership of the company as CEO and product architect (two positions he still holds to this day). To showcase the work Elon has done with Tesla we created "10 Facts You Didn't Know About Tesla Motors and Elon Musk".

​

 

[Burnt Toast]

So much wrong.

 

[boaterva]

Disneyland?! WTF? Who wrote this?

Edit. If I had time I'd try to source that piece of BS in the links at the bottom. Lol.

 

[Trips]

Annual Salary:
Elon: $45,936 (California Minimum Wage, I think they might be shorting him on overtime pay)
JB Straubel: $250,560
Doug Field: $301,153
Jon McNeill: $501,923
Jason Wheeler: $501,931

They all made a few extra dollars with Stock and Options.

 

[ecarfan]

So much wrong.

Yes, numerous errors in that post. I don't have time right now to correct them all...

 

[dhanson865]

Annual Salary:
Elon: $45,936 (California Minimum Wage, I think they might be shorting him on overtime pay)

California/Minimum wage 10.50 USD per hour x 40 hours x 52 weeks is only $21,840

Maybe it's Minimum wage x 2 (one for SpaceX, one for Tesla)? But that is only $43,680

 

[BluestarE3]

Yes, numerous errors in that post. I don't have time right now to correct them all...

I guess we can each pick away at them as time permits. I'll start with:

Tesla owns what used to be called the NUMMI factory, which Toyota and GM had originally constructed in Fremont.

The factory at the Fremont site predates NUMMI by two decades: Fremont Assembly - Wikipedia

 

[BluestarE3]

Disneyland?! WTF? Who wrote this?

Poor writing and/or reading skills. Eberhard did not get the name for Tesla Motors from Disneyland as the Infographic implies; he came up with the name while he and Carolyn were at Disneyland.
Here's The Untold Story Of How Tesla Motors Got Its Name

It's like saying the original design for the Compaq PC came from House of Pies instead of saying the founders sketched the original design while dining there.

 

[boaterva]

Poor writing and/or reading skills. Eberhard did not get the name for Tesla Motors from Disneyland as the Infographic implies; he came up with the name while he and Carolyn were at Disneyland.
Here's The Untold Story Of How Tesla Motors Got Its Name

It's like saying the original design for the Compaq PC came from House of Pies instead of saying the founders sketched the original design while dining there.

Good grief. Ooookay... well, that makes more sense. But it's irrelevant where you got an idea, even if a famous theme park. And you don't mention what you were doing when you had the brainstorm.

Who makes these infographics up?

 

[Carl]

Hey Julia - welcome to the forum. Well done infographic (I like the '50s design), great in its "classroom-style". Probably a bit outdated in terms of info (and there are also -obviously- simplifications, and a handful of things probably outright wrong) but all that can be also said of any classroom history book. Nice effort!

Take the opportunity of reading this thread to make it even better (e.g. obviously, Tesla got its name "at" Disneyland would be better than "from"). I'm sure others will chime in with a lot more relevant corrections.

Also, I know Elon more or less qualified the original Roadster idea as a disaster (not the Roadster itself, I think) but you are hurting many of this forum's members' feelings by stating that . And furthermore, without the (somewhat successful) Roadster (Tesla sold each and every one it wanted to sell - it didn't end up crushing them like GM did with the EV1!), there would have been no S, X or 3.

 

[BluestarE3]

Hey Julia - welcome to the forum. Well done infographic (I like the '50s design), great in its "classroom-style". Probably a bit outdated in terms of info (and there are also -obviously- simplifications, and a handful of things probably outright wrong) but all that can be also said of any classroom history book. Nice effort!

This is where the infographic came from: 10-Facts-Elon-Musk-Tesla-Motors

 

[Carl]

Julia said "we created", so I suppose she's behind it and wants some feedback?

 

[BluestarE3]

Julia said "we created", so I suppose she's behind it and wants some feedback?

That paragraph of text is part of the Stanley R. Harris infographic and not separate commentary by Julia in the OP. I suppose it's possible @JuliaB could have worked with Stanley on this, but since there's no attribution in the OP, it seems to be just a repost of Harris' work.

 

[Carl]

If true, please 'unsee' my posts and let this thread die ! If not, up to Julia to reply.