Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk is very much into limelight these days. He is indulging into a lot of controversies recently. After proposing to buy Twitter, he is now into questioned for hailing as the founder of his automobile firm, Tesla Inc. Vaibhav Sisinity, a Bengaluru-based man, also the founder of GrowthSchool; tweeted on Thursday that Musk is not the founder of Tesla. This is as much a shock to us as it is to you at the moment. Besides that, Vaibhav also claimed that Musk has acquired the automobile company.
Not even close to that. It was a shell corp with no employees, no IP, no designs, no prototype, literally nothing but a biz plan to commercialize AC Propulsion’s Tzero car, which was introduced to me by JB Straubel, *not* Eberhard.
Even name “Tesla Motors” was owned by others!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2022
If filing a shell corp constitutes “founding a company”, then I’d be the only founder of PayPal, since I filed the original incorporation docs for https://t.co/bOUOek5Cvy (later renamed PayPal), but that’s not what founding means.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2022
This statement led to a flood of replies and raised several questions on Elon Musk. However, Musk handled it in the best possible way he could. The billionaire replied very calmly, “Not even close to that!”. Moreover, he said that Tesla was a shell corp. with literally no employees to work for. Neither did it have designs, nor prototype. It didn’t even plan to commercialize AC Propulsion’s T-Zero car. Tesla didn’t even have an IP at that point in time. Even the name of the firm, “Tesla Motors” was not available, others had owned it. When Musk came to Tesla, it was nothing but a firm in need of recognition.
Elon Musk is not the actual founder of Tesla. However, a group of engineers founded the automobile giant in 2003 who wanted to prove that electric vehicles are as good as fuel vehicles. They had a vision that one day this vehicle will bring a change. Besides that, they had to corroborate that electric vehicles are better, easier, and fun to drive. Musk invested $6.5 million in the company in February 2004. Henceforth, he became the largest shareholder of the company. Eventually, he became the CEO of Tesla in 2008. Besides electric vehicles, Tesla also indulges in building scalable clean energy generation and storage products.
