memes

When most people talk about involvement, I understand it to be in designing and engineering of the product. Management of personelle, budgets, and securing funding is important, but the core of the product, while contingent on that, isnt the same as that.

I'll let an except from this article sum up the essence of his contribution, but he isn't an innovator, he's an investor and manager. I know this is a highly polarized topic, but understanding the actuality and the mythology of the man is important.

With that said, we need to give credit where credit is due. He recognized it as a good idea and put more money into making it happen than any was willing to do at the time.

Therefore, you could make the argument that Tesla wouldn’t have happened without Musk – making the founder argument moot.

After that, you also have to give some credit to Musk for Tesla’s success. He has been the CEO since 2008 and the company accomplished incredible things under his leadership. They succeeded in making EVs mainstream and pushed the industry to transition to battery-electric vehicles.

To this day, it is Musk’s original ‘Tesla Secret Master Plan’ in 2006 that convinced me Tesla would be the company to bring EVs into the mainstream. The plan made sense, and it was executed under his leadership. He took the original idea, fleshed it out, financed it, and then led the team that made it happen.

The last point is important because that’s where I start to agree with Musk’s naysayers again. Musk’s fans like to claim that he is some sort of engineering genius. Jamie Dimon just called him “our Einstein”. While I can admit that Elon is smart and has an above-average understanding of many physics and engineering principles, comparing him to one of the most impactful theoretical physicists of all time is pure madness.

While Musk has made technical contributions to Tesla, I think they are often overblown by his fanbase and Tesla’s team doesn’t get enough credit. JB Straubel, Tesla’s longtime Chief Technology Officer until 2019, and his teams should get the vast majority of the credit for the technical contributions and advancements to battery technology and power electronics that made Tesla successful.

There are too many to name them all, but I have been reporting on Tesla for more than a decade. Through my reporting, sources have praised people like Straubel, Drew Baglino, Kurt Kelty, Colin Campbell, Peter Rawlinson, Charles Kuehmann, Alan Clarke, Dan Priestley, Lars Moravy, David Zhang, Evan Small, and Franz von Holzhausen for their contributions to Tesla.