The Two Engineers

Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning were not first-time founders when they started Tesla. In 1997, the pair built NuvoMedia and created the Rocket eBook -- the first commercially available handheld e-reader, a 22-ounce slab that could hold roughly ten books in its 4 megabytes of memory. It sold well enough that Gemstar-TV Guide bought the company in 2000 for $187 million. Eberhard and Tarpenning had already proven they could take a hardware idea from concept to a successful exit once.

Three years later, they did it again with a much harder problem. Eberhard, a computer engineer with degrees from the University of Illinois, had watched wealthy Silicon Valley neighbors keep a fuel-efficient hybrid for the conscience and a fast, impractical sports car for fun, and wondered why an electric car couldn't be both at once. A small outfit called AC Propulsion had already built a proof of concept -- an electric conversion called the tzero that could out-accelerate a Ferrari -- but had no interest in mass-producing it. Eberhard and Tarpenning licensed the idea and incorporated Tesla Motors on July 1, 2003, naming it after the engineer behind the AC induction motor. Eberhard took the CEO title; Tarpenning ran the technical and financial side as CFO.