Building the Team

Eberhard and Tarpenning didn't build Tesla alone for long. Ian Wright, an engineer who'd been part of the founding conversations, joined the earliest team but left relatively quickly to found his own electric-vehicle company, Wrightspeed, focused on converting trucks and buses to electric drivetrains. He remains, legally, one of Tesla's five recognized co-founders despite his short tenure -- a title earned by being in the room at the start, not by staying for the outcome.

JB Straubel, who joined in May 2004 as chief technical officer, is the opposite case: he stayed for fifteen years and shaped the technology as much as anyone at the company, including Musk. Straubel is widely credited with the core engineering behind Tesla's battery packs and powertrains -- the systems that let a car company built on a licensed sports-car conversion eventually out-engineer automakers with a century's head start. He stepped down as CTO in July 2019 to focus full-time on Redwood Materials, a battery-recycling company he'd quietly founded in 2017 while still running Tesla's technology -- and returned to Tesla in 2023 as a nominated member of its board of directors.

The same February 2004 that brought Wright and Straubel's earliest colleagues together also brought Tesla its most famous name: Elon Musk led the company's $7.5 million Series A round, invested $6.5 million of his own PayPal money, and took the chairman's seat. He was, at that point, one investor among a growing team of engineers -- not yet the person running the company day to day.