Editor's note: Last December, Insider interviewed Eberhard and compiled this story. Martin Eberhard used to be called "Mr. Tesla," but now he calls himself a "retired entrepreneur." The Tesla co-founder talked about everything from his early startup to the future of electric cars, including some of his "personal feuds" with Musk.
There are many legendary stories behind many legendary entrepreneurs, not to mention Musk, who can cause heated discussions about half the world every day. In this super long interview, through the first-person perspective of Martin Eberhard, another founder of Tesla, you can see the birth of Tesla, and perhaps Musk's little-known side? Of course, any character interview will not be so objective, so it is difficult for us to evaluate or admit the truth of every sentence, but if you read it as a story, it is still quite interesting.
In addition, in this story, you can read that as a founder's slightly conservative and cautious personality, perhaps this has revealed that he and the familiar Musk cannot exist in Tesla at the same time, and in the end, even I personally feel that if Martin Eberhard was left behind, then Tesla probably did not exist.
Although Musk is widely recognized as the founder of Tesla, his role in the history of the automaker may be more complicated. In 2003, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning co-founded Tesla. Musk, on the other hand, led the company's $7.5 million Series A funding round and became Tesla's chairman of the board in 2004.
Then Eberhard and Musk got into a fight, and Musk ousted Eberhard from the CEO position in 2007. Musk said Eberhard hindered production of Tesla's first vehicle, the Roadster, among other issues.
Musk, who took over as CEO in 2008, said Eberhard was the worst person he ever worked with. Eberhard sued Musk in 2009, accusing him of defamation. (The two later settled their case.) ）
I don't fire employees casually
Eberhard said that if he knew about Tesla today, he would do a million different things at Tesla, and these are big and small regrets. For example, Eberhard felt Tesla spent too much time discussing whether it sold cars through dealerships or direct sales. He also said that while he will certainly make some technical changes to the Roadster, overall, he is proud of the end result the team has created. "If you have hindsight, you realize all the mistakes you've made," he said. "But I think, in the big picture, we got it right. For the first time in decades, we succeeded in building a car company."
"If I could do it all over again, would I take his money?" Eberhard asked himself that the money was referring to Musk's investment. "I don't see any other money on the table." It seems that there was no choice at the beginning. Musk led Tesla's $7.5 million Series A funding round and became chairman of the board in 2004. Eberhard said he would make some different choices than Musk if he stayed. "For example, I would be very opposed to buying SolarCity," which he believes is a distraction for Tesla.
Tesla acquired solar company SolarCity in 2016 for $2.6 billion. Musk came under scrutiny in the acquisition because the company was run by his cousin, Lyndon Rive, who had problems running the business. Some Tesla shareholders filed a lawsuit accusing Musk of pressuring Tesla's board members to buy SolarCity and bail it out; But Musk won the case last year. In 2021, Tesla's energy production and storage division generated nearly $3 billion in revenue.
In addition to expressing regret about the company's direction, Eberhard also has his own views on Tesla's corporate culture today. He said that if he stays at the company, he will try to create a more positive culture at Tesla. "I'm a firm believer in treating employees with respect, and I don't like to see things like casual dismissals happen," he said. "This way the culture within the company may be a little better."
Eberhard's remarks seem to coincide with previous reports that Musk may be a difficult person to work for, saying that Musk is very irritable and even fires employees directly in anger, but Musk denied such allegations and said in 2021 that he provided "clear and candid" feedback to employees. Insider has also asked Musk to verify these claims, but so far Musk has not responded.
Describing his own management style, Eberhard said, "I try to keep the company motivated by getting them to fulfill their mission and make them realize that what we're doing really matters to the world. This motivating effort to put in a lot of time to accomplish is not out of fear, but out of that sense of accomplishment and responsibility. "Of course, I don't fire employees for no reason," he added. "But I do have to fire some people sometimes, but I don't really like it."
The real Musk? Fake Musk?
In the inevitable conversation about Musk, Eberhard said he has tried to avoid news about Musk in recent years.
Eberhard said he blocked Musk in Twitter's News Feed. "I don't need to look at anything about him, watching these tweets just makes me indigestion, but even if I don't want to see these things, it's often Musk who sends crazy tweets, and then suddenly a group of reporters come to me and ask me what I think." So Eberhard simply can't escape Musk.
But Eberhard said he did notice a change: He described Musk as being more hands-on with his company than he was at Tesla during Eberhard's tenure. He thinks Musk is more hands-on than he did when he was at Tesla, and that's exactly what he is. Tesla's early history is a bone of contention between Musk and Eberhard. Musk said in a tweet in November that he "was the product owner and led the original Roadster design." Eberhard certainly refutes this claim.
Eberhard said that while he is the CEO and Musk is the chairman of the board, Musk attends monthly board meetings but does not often work for the company. "So the reports of all kinds of inspiration or ideas he had while sitting in the car at work or doing other things are simply not true," Eberhard said. "After all, he doesn't even go to the company."
Eberhard also said that when Tesla began to receive more media attention, he realized that the friction between him and Musk was getting bigger. "When we started doing some publicity or reporting about Tesla, his behavior changed dramatically," Eberhard said. "If any article about Tesla doesn't highlight his name, he's angry. That's when I realized that this involved a self that I hadn't realized before." Eberhard, known as "Mr. Tesla" at the time, said Musk would call him and yell at him whenever Musk was not mentioned in the company's report.
In 2007, Musk ousted Eberhard and soon became Tesla's CEO, but this did not represent a break in the relationship between the two. Eberhard said that when SpaceX sent its first rocket into space in 2008, he also sent Musk a congratulatory letter, but Musk never replied to him. It was only after Musk began to call himself the founder of Tesla and make negative comments about Eberhard did Eberhard file a defamation lawsuit against Musk in 2009. The lawsuit was settled that same year for an undisclosed amount on the condition that Musk and two other Tesla executives, JB Straubel and Ian Wright, also receive the title of Tesla's founder, and that Musk and Eberhard also sign a non-disparaging agreement.
Musk also occasionally tweets about Eberhard. Eberhard said that although he is not sure why Musk always mentions him since he is not in touch, he has a conjecture that he thinks is reasonable. "My guess is because he tried for years to frame the claim that he was the founder of Tesla, and now people know it's not true." However, Eberhard said that for this matter, "like I said, I am relatively powerless, I can not do much, I can only accept."
Don't go head-to-head with Tesla
Eberhard said that when he and Tapenning founded Tesla in 2003, everyone thought it was "impossible" to make money by building electric cars. After traditional automakers like Ford largely abandoned electric cars, Tesla was the only startup to try. But today, the IEA estimates that 13% of cars sold globally in 2022 will be electric. "In a way, we won," Eberhard said. "We succeeded."
Eberhard has a piece of advice for startups and traditional automakers that are joining the electric car industry: "Don't try to compete head-to-head with Tesla." Eberhard said the auto industry is not a "winner-take-all industry." "Unlike many Silicon Valley companies, the auto industry is not a winner-take-all industry," he said. "There are different kinds of cars for different market segments."
The Tesla co-founder said he was disappointed with certain companies like Lucid. He said Lucid is trying to compete directly with the Model S with a similar electric sedan, the Lucid Air. (Eberhard said he worked for Lucid, still known as Atieva for a while in 2015, but he was not a "big fan" of the CEO at the time and left six weeks later.) Lucid confirmed that Eberhard worked for the company for a while in 2015, but declined to comment on his departure. Representatives of the startup pushed back against Eberhard's description of the Lucid Air, calling it "the new benchmark for EV sports sedans."
Eberhard said he was more impressed with companies like Rivian. "Rivian is very special, 'As you know, the number one selling car in North America is the F-150. So if we want to find a new market, it should be a profitable area,'" Eberhard said. While Tesla dominates the U.S. electric vehicle market, Ford comes in second. Ford sold more than 41,000 electric vehicles in the first three quarters of 2022, while Tesla delivered more than 900,000 in the same period.
Eberhard said Tesla has been waiting for other companies to catch up, but he doesn't see companies like Ford as a threat.
Tesla's biggest threat is itself?
In Eberhard's view, Tesla is hardly threatened by other automakers, but interestingly, he feels that the biggest threat to Tesla comes from within the company - self-driving technology, and Eberhard's view is also interesting. "In my opinion, we need to move away from thinking of all these autonomous driving related things as something that is strongly associated with electric vehicles," Eberhard added, "and I would like to see people thinking about building cars that people can drive." Translated, it's a human-centric car.
Musk has made self-driving technology a key part of Tesla's future. Last year, he described Tesla's FSD as the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and almost nothing. Musk has said Tesla is "both a software company and a hardware company." But Eberhard thinks it's not that simple. Eberhard put it bluntly, he didn't like Tesla's FSD. "I think it's a mistake to think of a car as a hardware platform that supports software like an iPhone, and a car is not the same as a mobile phone," he said.
"I also use the iPhone, and every time I update the system, I find that it has bugs of one kind or another," Eberhard adds. "These bugs mean that, for example, the app I use to watch the news will occasionally crash, but that's not a big deal, it's not catastrophic, but if there's a bug in FSD, like my brake or steering wheel, the worst thing is that it can lead to human casualties."
Eberhard said that while he also appreciates "safety-oriented systems" such as driver assistance features, he is "not a big fan of autonomous driving". He said Musk seemed too preoccupied with self-driving cars, one of his biggest concerns about Tesla under Musk. "I think the technology is too immature to be on the road," he said, referring to Tesla's FSD Beta. "I mean, it's my cautious nature, and if it were me, I would really have a hard time releasing a self-driving software that might go wrong."
Musk has said in the past that there will indeed be some bugs in beta versions of the software and encouraged drivers to report software issues. Musk has promised for years that Tesla will soon have fully autonomous vehicles, but it seems that it is still far from achieving full self-driving, and both ethically and regulatorially, drivers are still required to monitor the vehicle at all times in response to emergencies. Eberhard also said that when he was CEO of Tesla, those "autopilots" did not exist. "I don't have the budget to do a so-called in-car entertainment system in the car, let alone think about something like Autopilot," he says.
Leave Tesla in a Roadster
Eberhard, who left Tesla, did not have a good time. He said he was essentially "unemployed" for two years as a result of his intellectual property agreement with Tesla, which left him essentially without money or work until the agreement expired. "On the day the deadline expired, Volkswagen hired me," Eberhard said. He joined Volkswagen in the fall of 2009 as director of electric vehicle development at the Electronics Research Lab, but left two years later. At that time, he said, there was a lot of resistance to trying to develop electric vehicles in traditional automakers.
He went on to work briefly with several other startups, including Lucid and SF Motors, and later founded two EV battery startups, Inevit and Tiveni. Eberhard, though wandering around, isn't far from Tesla, and he still drives his Roadster every day while his wife drives the Model S. Eberhard bought the second-ever Roadster in 2008, but he stopped driving it about six or seven years ago, although he occasionally took it to auto shows; The custom-painted Roadster also has a plaque that reads "Mr. Tesla." And now, he drives a second-hand Roadster.
Eberhard said he still owns a "minority stake" in Tesla. While he declined to comment on the size of his holdings, he said he held shares longer than anyone else — he got them two minutes before Tapenning got them, and Eberhard left in 2007 with less than 5 percent of Tesla. "I had a bigger stake, but I sold a bunch early, and while it's not ideal now, that's what I did," he said.
Today, Eberhard and Tapenning run a small private investment firm. They get together every Wednesday for coffee, which they've been doing since 1988. "If one of us wasn't available that day, it would be Tuesday or Thursday, or sometimes it would be lunch, and even during COVID, we would have virtual coffee," he said. "It was in coffee like this that we thought of the NuvoMedia Rocket eBook, a 1988 e-reader, where Tesla's dream began."
Original source:
INSIDER
Original title:
《Ousted Tesla cofounder Martin Eberhard sounds off on Elon Musk, how the company has changed, and the EV wars》
Original author:
Grace Kay
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2?_gl=1*s7oaol*_ga*MTY4MjE3NTQwNy4xNjc2ODc5MzAz*_ga_E21CV80ZCZ*MTY3Njg3OTMwMi4xLjAuMTY3Njg3OTMwNy4wLjAuMA