--:-- Announcer: AI agents are getting pretty impressive. You might not even realize you're listening to one right now. We work 24-7 to resolve customer inquiries. No hold music, no canned answers, no frustration. Visit sierra.ai to learn more.
--:-- Announcer: Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique. Fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say. So we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe, expose corruption wherever we find it, and give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate, and more. Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- Karen: Hi, everyone. Karen here. After a long month, Scott will be back on Pivot this coming Friday. I know you're all excited. But in the meantime, we'd like to share another podcast that Scott and I recently contributed to. Land of the Giants from The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network has a new season out about one of our favorite topics, Tesla. It's called the Tesla Shockwave, hosted by automotive journalists Tamara Warren and Patrick George. They tell the story about Tesla's origins, its internal battles, and its broken promises.
--:-- Karen: In this episode, we're about to share your story directly from Tesla's founders, Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpening, about how the company was originally formed and how Elon Musk used his clout, money, and even a few strong-arm tactics to get rid of them both and install himself as CEO. And you'll also hear from one of your favorite tech journalists and podcast hosts, and also one of mine. That would be me.
--:-- Karen: It's Tesla's origin story, but it's also the story of the cult of Elon Musk. Give it a listen and then go follow Land of the Giants in your podcast app for the rest of the story.
--:-- Patrick George: The year 2000 was a crazy good year for Elon Musk. He was the CEO of an exciting new startup, a company that promised to disrupt a fundamental part of daily life, how you pay for things. With PayPal, you can pay for anything, anytime, anywhere. A brand new company that was the result of a merger between Musk's online bank and a payments company co-founded by a guy named Peter Thiel.
--:-- Patrick George: Musk and Thiel looked like a dream team on paper. Two Silicon Valley rising stars with one vision, blow up the banking world. Musk even felt confident enough as CEO to take a quick break. I've gotten married earlier that year and not had any vacation or honeymoon or anything. Turns out he was a little too confident because Musk's honeymoon period at PayPal was already over.
--:-- Liz Lopato: I think it's not a good idea to leave the office when there are like a lot of major things underway which are causing people a great deal of stress. Elon went on his honeymoon and they did a coup and forced him out.
--:-- Patrick George: Musk may have been the CEO of PayPal, but Thiel had installed guys from his former company in most of the other C-suite slots. The moment Musk was out of sight, they persuaded PayPal's board to oust him and replace him with none other than Peter Thiel.
--:-- Elon Musk: There was just a lot of worry, and that caused the management team to decide that I wasn't the right guy to run the company.
--:-- Patrick George: Another way to look at this coup is that Musk was never really in control of PayPal, even with that CEO title. Thiel was the one who held all the cards.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Lesson learned. Elon Musk is very much about Elon Musk. And there's like a real need for control that shows up in his companies where he needs to be in charge all of the time. Having learned from PayPal that if he didn't create that situation, he could potentially be fired.
--:-- Patrick George: But after PayPal, Musk had no company to control. Licking his wounds, he started looking around for something different. On a personal level at this point, I would say I'm a little tired of the internet. The next company that I do, one of the things that I think would be important is that it has some long-term beneficial effect.
--:-- Patrick George: A few years later, a couple of guys who were also excited about changing the world came to him with an idea. And it was just what he was looking for. A fast, sporty, electric car. Musk went all in.
--:-- Patrick George: This is Land of the Giants. I'm Patrick George, your co-host this season. I'm an automotive journalist. I've covered the industry for about a decade, including as the editor-in-chief of Jalopnik and editorial director of The Drive. And the whole time I've been covering cars, I can tell you that nothing has quite defined the modern car industry like the rise of Tesla.
--:-- Patrick George: But not many people remember it wasn't Musk's idea to start with. Today, the story of how Elon Musk made Tesla his own and the perils of shaping a company in one's own image.
--:-- Patrick George: Before Musk even arrived, there were two guys with a dream. In 2000, Martin Eberhard had just sold his first startup, developing an early e-reader technology. He needed a new ride, and he wanted to treat himself a bit.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: I was considering getting myself a new car and something fun and sporty.
--:-- Patrick George: He loved to drive fast cars, but a Porsche 911, a Ferrari? Problem was, those cars were terrible on gas.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: To me, by 2001, climate change looked real. It looked like it was a real deal.
--:-- Patrick George: So he looked around for something a little less like a carbon bomb. But the options at the time were kind of sad.
--:-- Mark Tarpening: Martin called these cars punishment cars, designed by people who really didn't believe you should be driving.
--:-- Patrick George: This is Mark Tarpening, Eberhard's friend and business partner since the 80s.
--:-- Mark Tarpening: You know, you should be riding your bike or taking public transit or walking. But if you had to drive, you needed to be put into one of these things to be punished.
--:-- Patrick George: That got Marx and my head thinking about that this was a real opportunity. What if there was an electric car that was fast, sleek, and sexy?
--:-- Mark Tarpening: For people like Eberhard, rich dudes who like flashy toys.
--:-- Patrick George: When you look at the market, it turns out there's a segment that is super into that, and that's a sports car segment. And the faster you can get to, you know, zero to 60 miles per hour, the more people are willing to pay.
--:-- Mark Tarpening: And if you can really get it close, people are willing to pay almost an insane amount of money for it.
--:-- Patrick George: The guys wanted that kind of car, and the money didn't sound bad either. So they decided to do something audacious, start their own car company.
--:-- Patrick George: The first thing they needed to do was figure out how to power the car. At the time, lithium-ion batteries were mostly used for small things like e-readers and laptops.
--:-- Patrick George: But the guys knew these batteries could do a lot more, like power a car for a much greater distance on a single charge than anyone had ever seen before.
--:-- Patrick George: But these were tech guys. They didn't know where to begin with building the rest of the car.
--:-- Patrick George: So they partnered with a small British automaker named Lotus. A Lotus body would house all the cool EV tech these guys could come up with.
--:-- Patrick George: The last thing they needed was a name.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: I had been out on a date with a woman who became my wife, and I'd been in the back of my head thinking about this company and thinking about names. And the idea of Tesla came to me, and I proposed that to her, and she loved it.
--:-- Patrick George: Okay, so they actually needed one more thing, money.
--:-- Patrick George: There were so many reasons not to invest in Tesla that we didn't exactly have investors coming out of the woodwork wanting to invest in us.
--:-- Patrick George: For months, the pair were in and out of dozens of venture capital firms. It was a pretty radical idea, you know, a new car company.
--:-- Patrick George: Wall Street and VCs loathed the car industry. Cars were expensive, capital-intensive products that required complicated supply chains and enormous amounts of manual labor.
--:-- Patrick George: Newcomers never succeeded. And remember, nobody was taking EVs seriously back then.
--:-- Patrick George: But there was one person with a lot of extra cash who was not easily daunted.
--:-- Patrick George: We got an intro to Elon.
--:-- Patrick George: Musk was into risk. I mean, his other company was trying to colonize Mars.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: My initial impression of him was he was quite smart and quite enthusiastic.
--:-- Patrick George: He immediately got it. He was like, oh, I see you did all the math. I love that. You know, I'm in.
--:-- Kara Swisher: And I mean, you wouldn't guess it by the things he said today, but at the time, it seemed really clear that he understood that climate change was a real problem.
--:-- Patrick George: When Musk made his first investment in Eberhard and Tarpening's company, he was almost four years out from the sting of being ousted from PayPal.
--:-- Patrick George: And on his way to establishing a reputation as a kind of tech maverick.
--:-- Kara Swisher: He had a very restless mind, and I think he found he had a very big interest with the world dying.
--:-- Kara Swisher: That's why he was interested in space travel, to get off this planet. He always thought there should be a multi-planetary species.
--:-- Kara Swisher: He was worried about the end times. So that's why he focused on things like Tesla, which he thought was existential to the human race.
--:-- Kara Swisher: To Swisher, Musk was nothing like his peers. Everyone around him was building online stores or primitive social networks, and Musk was trying to save the world.
--:-- Kara Swisher: He could have made a lot more money a lot easier doing other things, and he didn't.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I think he was always motivated by making the impossible happen.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I think he was still motivated by his feeling that the Earth was going to be destroyed and he was critical to stopping that in some way.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Sounds great but maybe a bit of a red flag too.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I think he had sort of a God complex. Only I can do it.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Sounds like Trump, right?
--:-- Patrick George: But as far as Eberhard and Tarpening were concerned, they had just gotten their first check, $6.5 million.
--:-- Patrick George: As the lead investor, Musk became the chairman of the board and appointed his brother and an old friend as directors.
--:-- Patrick George: The founders took on executive positions. Eberhard is CEO and Tarpening is CFO and VP of Engineering.
--:-- Patrick George: With the new money coming in, they could finally hire people to build their very first car, the Tesla Roadster.
--:-- Dave Lyons: I got brought into a back room and they said, hey, look, we're starting this car company. It's going to be huge.
--:-- Dave Lyons: You're either with us or against us.
--:-- Dave Lyons: Martin Everhart is a very fast-talking guy, and he was pretty charismatic, I have to say.
--:-- Dave Lyons: And then there was this other quiet guy, Elon, in the corner who really didn't say anything.
--:-- Dave Lyons: Lyons didn't know if electric cars had much of a future, but the room was full of energy and potential.
--:-- Dave Lyons: And he knew a little bit about that quiet guy and his ambitions.
--:-- Dave Lyons: So he was intrigued.
--:-- Dave Lyons: Well, this guy's got a rocket company, and he's saying this is going to take off.
--:-- Dave Lyons: So, I mean, that pitch sold pretty well to me.
--:-- Dave Lyons: Lyons became employee number 12, but Tesla would need a whole lot more people like him before it could make anything, let alone a brand new kind of electric car.
--:-- Patrick George: Musk had faced this challenge before at SpaceX, and he had developed a sort of recruitment philosophy that seemed to work.
--:-- Patrick George: I remember one day he told us about his kind of, you know, his view of the world where like, all these companies are all bound up by all this regulatory mess, and they don't get to do the good ideas.
--:-- Patrick George: And the young engineers that are working at these aerospace companies, they're, you know, kind of low men on the totem pole with all these older moon launch era managers who kind of tell them what they can't do all the time.
--:-- Patrick George: And he was saying, like, what I want to do is I'm going to hire all those energetic smart guys and give them freedom to soar.
--:-- Patrick George: There were lessons here for Tesla.
--:-- Patrick George: SpaceX plucked young, bright engineers out of government jobs and gave them the freedom to innovate.
--:-- Patrick George: Tesla could do something similar, attract the most dynamic talent from the old rigid auto companies with promises of creative empowerment and equity.
--:-- Patrick George: For the next few years, the whole company was focused on one goal, launching the Roadster, the car that would announce Tesla to the world.
--:-- Patrick George: That day finally came in July 2006.
--:-- Announcer: This is one of the great cars, Tesla Roadster, electric car that gets 250 miles per charge.
--:-- Announcer: And of course, the birthday party for a flashy sports car, had a celebrity guest list, including California's governor at the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
--:-- Announcer: White hot.
--:-- Announcer: The Roadster was tear your face off quick.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: Eberhard, as CEO, took the lead on planning the Roadster's public debut.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: He hired a publicist to help out.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: She's the one who put together the basic idea of what that launch event would look like, from the idea of having it at an airport and having a track outside where people could drive, to having the event held in a giant tent where the track actually came in and people could see these cars coming and going and line up and go for a ride.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: All of this, this was basically her idea.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: This wasn't just the debut of the Roadster prototype, it was also the debut of Tesla.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: I went to show this idea to Elon down in LA and he basically had me fire her on the spot.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: Eberhard was taken aback.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: It was the first time Musk had ever done something like this.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: Reach into Eberhard's company and demand someone be fired.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: But Musk was adamant.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: Eberhard realized if he wanted to, Musk could take it to the board, and that was a fight he would have lost.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: Over the previous two years, Musk had remained the lead funder, allowing him to stack the board with guys loyal to himself.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: Not everyone was a Musk guy, but the math didn't look good.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: So Eberhard did what he was told.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: Which was heartbreaking for me.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: And then he hired his own team of people to produce exactly the party that she had laid out exactly.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: So I didn't understand what that was about.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: It was very strange.
--:-- Patrick George: Now, Eberhard didn't always fold on key decisions, especially when it came to building the cars.
--:-- Patrick George: But he could see that this moment, Tesla's debut, was very important to Musk.
--:-- Patrick George: It was Tesla's first big splash, the reveal of its first car.
--:-- Patrick George: And Musk seemed like he had to be out in front, They are to take credit and absorb the limelight as the face of the company.
--:-- Patrick George: The opportunity is now and the need is now to have a car company of this nature.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: Eberhard says Musk became sort of obsessed with this idea.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: He remembers when the New York Times first wrote about Tesla.
--:-- Martin Eberhard: It left out any reference to Musk, and he was furious.
--:-- Patrick George: By the way, we've reached out to Elon Musk and Tesla about this and other stuff.
--:-- Patrick George: We never heard back.
--:-- Patrick George: It's worth noting that Tesla doesn't even have someone who handles media requests anymore.
--:-- Patrick George: Anyways, Musk had inserted himself into the process of making the car as well.
--:-- Patrick George: Small stuff, mostly.
--:-- Patrick George: There were a lot of little sort of random interventions that he would come in and say, I want this change or whatever.
--:-- Patrick George: Like door handles.
--:-- Patrick George: He was determined that the doors on the roadster should not open with a handle, but with a button.
--:-- Patrick George: The motorized door handles on the roadster, you know, they're cool, But they were also quite tricky to get right because the door latches on a car have to work correctly even after it's crashed.
--:-- Patrick George: And if the power goes out, then how does the electric thing work?
--:-- Patrick George: And we wound up spending some number of millions of dollars to get that to work right and to get it to pass the site impact crash test.
--:-- Patrick George: And it wasn't just door handles.
--:-- Patrick George: Musk decreed the seats weren't comfortable and the door frame needed adjustments and the headlights didn't look cool enough.
--:-- Patrick George: Meanwhile, the company had much bigger problems than door handles, and it wasn't due to Musk's meddling.
--:-- Patrick George: I was over budget and behind schedule on the project.
--:-- Patrick George: Sourcing parts for a tiny car startup, and an electric one no less, was extremely difficult.
--:-- Patrick George: Suppliers were reluctant to sell just a few parts to a small company that might not even exist within a year.
--:-- Patrick George: But also, things like heating or air conditioning that played nice with EV tech, there was almost no demand for these parts, so they weren't widely available.
--:-- Patrick George: You couldn't just put in an order and expect a shipment.
--:-- Patrick George: If you could ask me what was the thing that was the most surprising to me, the thing I was not expecting, that was how hard was the supply chain problem.
--:-- Patrick George: I just didn't expect it to be that difficult.
--:-- Patrick George: They were a whole year behind schedule, and the car was shaping up to cost way more to produce than they had ever planned to sell it for.
--:-- Patrick George: It was getting to be clear that I was maybe not the right guy to be the CEO for the company for a long time, to myself.
--:-- Patrick George: So Eberhard began the search for his replacement.
--:-- Patrick George: Which was fine.
--:-- Patrick George: He looked forward to working on something else at Tesla.
--:-- Patrick George: I would have taken a role as, you know, CTO or vice president of whatever, blah, anyways, but someplace where I'm spending most of my time working on the technology or on evangelizing the company.
--:-- Patrick George: That was what I imagined.
--:-- Patrick George: That's what we had discussed with the board of directors.
--:-- Patrick George: But Musk had something else in mind.
--:-- Patrick George: A few months into the search for a new CEO, Eberhard got a call from Musk.
--:-- Patrick George: He'd found someone who might work as Eberhard's replacement.
--:-- Patrick George: He came across as though this is a friendly suggestion.
--:-- Patrick George: After all, it was Eberhard who was leading his own replacement effort.
--:-- Patrick George: This was just a suggestion, right?
--:-- Patrick George: And then I learned basically the next day through email that the board had basically voted me off the island.
--:-- Patrick George: Eberhard was out as CEO.
--:-- Patrick George: Musk's pick was in.
--:-- Patrick George: Eberhard's own search for a new CEO looked like kind of a sham.
--:-- Patrick George: And the assurance that he'd always have a role at Tesla was now totally in question.
--:-- Patrick George: I felt like a brick on the side of my head.
--:-- Patrick George: It felt like I got hit on the side of my head with a brick.
--:-- Patrick George: It was totally unexpected.
--:-- Patrick George: And there was nothing he could do about it.
--:-- Patrick George: The company that had sprung from Eberhard's desire to drive a better sports car was now completely out of his control.
--:-- Patrick George: Keep in mind, who was on the board of directors?
--:-- Patrick George: It was Elon, right?
--:-- Patrick George: It was his brother.
--:-- Patrick George: Okay, he's kind of aligned.
--:-- Patrick George: It was Antonio Gracias, who was an old buddy of his and had made a lot of money off of previous investments with Elon.
--:-- Patrick George: Musk controlled half the board.
--:-- Patrick George: Eberhard says he asked for the board to vote again, this time with him present.
--:-- Patrick George: The result?
--:-- Patrick George: A demotion to the made-up role of president of technology.
--:-- Patrick George: No one reporting to him, no responsibilities.
--:-- Patrick George: But even that wouldn't last very long.
--:-- Patrick George: I was asked to resign.
--:-- Patrick George: Well, for me, it was really sad.
--:-- Patrick George: His co-founder, Mark Tarpening, left shortly after that.
--:-- Patrick George: If Eberhard sounds a little muted, it's because he has to be.
--:-- Patrick George: He sued Musk and Tesla, claiming libel, defamation, breach of contract, infliction of emotional distress, and failure to pay his wages, among other things.
--:-- Patrick George: The lawsuit was settled out of court.
--:-- Patrick George: I have a mutual non-disparagement agreement signed with Musk.
--:-- Patrick George: And although he's been flakantly violating that agreement over and over and over again, he's also the richest man in the world.
--:-- Patrick George: And if he decides to crush me with lawsuits, I can't survive it.
--:-- Patrick George: Tesla's founders were out.
--:-- Patrick George: Musk had personally picked a new CEO.
--:-- Patrick George: But really, by then, he was running the show.
--:-- Patrick George: There was a new sheriff in town, no doubt about that.
--:-- Patrick George: And he was quite drastic.
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--:-- Patrick George: The Roadster Watch me take off!
--:-- Announcer: Tesla started delivering the Roadster in 2008.
--:-- Announcer: Late night legend and famous car guy Jay Leno got to test drive one and he was an instant fan.
--:-- Announcer: You know, the thing that's fascinated me about this car is you've eliminated all the negatives of an electric car.
--:-- Announcer: A lot of times...
--:-- Announcer: Tesla proved it can make an EV that didn't feel like a punishment car.
--:-- Announcer: The Roadster cost as much as a Porsche 911, but it could keep up with one too, and it didn't use gasoline.
--:-- Announcer: The founders were gone, but their dream had become a reality.
--:-- Announcer: And Tesla's engineering team was primed to work on the next challenge.
--:-- Announcer: And all the engineers, not just some of the engineers, all the engineers wanted to work on the cool new high-volume project.
--:-- Announcer: They knew exactly what it would be, a luxury sedan, the Model S.
--:-- Announcer: This was the plan going back to Eberhard and Tarpening's original business proposal.
--:-- Announcer: The team was ready to go, but their timing could not have been worse.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: The economy went into absolute free fall.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: This was the peak Lehman Brothers liquidity freeze.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: Both General Motors and Chrysler declared bankruptcy.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: This was called Carmageddon, right?
--:-- Rachel Conrad: It was literally the worst downfall in the auto industry for a couple of generations.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: This is no exaggeration.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: Analysts at the time fully expected at least one of the big three American automakers to go out of business.
--:-- Patrick George: At this point, Musk's handpicked replacement for Eberhard had already bounced.
--:-- Patrick George: Another followed, but didn't last long either.
--:-- Patrick George: Ultimately, Musk looked around and decided the crown belonged on his own head.
--:-- Patrick George: He named himself CEO.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: In December of 2008, Tesla literally had one day of cash runway before they would have to enter the zone of insolvency and they would just flame out.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: It was a kingdom in trouble.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: Still, Tesla closed out the year with a holiday party.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: We could not rent a place.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: We didn't even have a caterer.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: We literally set up tables in the Tesla garage in Menlo Park.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: So there they were, sitting in some folding chairs in front of a hydraulic lift, drinking cheap wine and wondering if the company would last another day.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: And Elon stands on a table, literally, and says, guys, we just shifted in America from having a Texas oil man who was president to an environmentalist named Barack Obama, who has vowed not just to help the auto industry at large, but to specifically accelerate the shift to electrification.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: If you can't see the opportunity in that, you are not looking.
--:-- Patrick George: This story about Musk feels like a freeze frame in a movie.
--:-- Patrick George: The moment before the man is made.
--:-- Patrick George: Well before Musk becomes the richest person on the planet.
--:-- Patrick George: Before he even becomes famous.
--:-- Patrick George: Before he gets a Twitter account with tweets that move markets.
--:-- Patrick George: In this moment, he's just trying to move people enough to stay in their jobs.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: For Conrad, who'd been on the job just a few months, it was a moment of clarity.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: Musk made it seem like anything was possible.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: He seemed brilliant.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: He had a vision.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: He was in control.
--:-- Rachel Conrad: And the way he said it was so fucking powerful that everyone in there, he had us all.
--:-- Patrick George: Musk kept Tesla afloat by injecting his own money in the company.
--:-- Patrick George: My salary is minimum wage.
--:-- Patrick George: So, I'm a volunteer.
--:-- Patrick George: Basically.
--:-- Patrick George: He was even writing personal checks to cover payroll and charging work expenses to his credit card.
--:-- Patrick George: The doors of Sand Hill Road, the epicenter of the global venture capital industry, were bolted shut.
--:-- Patrick George: Okay.
--:-- Patrick George: Nobody would give Elon a penny.
--:-- Patrick George: Elon Musk, the most brilliant technologist who ever lived, right, the one who all VCs kiss his ass now, none of them would give him a penny.
--:-- Patrick George: Around that same time, he found another audience, one that was willing to listen.
--:-- Patrick George: He got a Twitter account.
--:-- Liz Lopato: Almost immediately, because of his history with PayPal, etc., he had a bit of a following.
--:-- Liz Lopato: He didn't tweet much at first.
--:-- Liz Lopato: Updates about his companies, recommending books he liked.
--:-- Liz Lopato: To be able to harness very, very low-cost channels to talk directly to consumers, policymakers, regulators, thought leaders, media, etc., is very high leverage.
--:-- Liz Lopato: Twitter offered Musk something that couldn't be bought.
--:-- Liz Lopato: I think Musk's insight was that he didn't just need to speak to media.
--:-- Liz Lopato: He could also speak directly to his audience through social media.
--:-- Liz Lopato: And that creates the kind of direct relationship that all of the news interviews in the world can't create because Elon Musk reads his replies.
--:-- Liz Lopato: Musk used Twitter like no other CEO at the time.
--:-- Liz Lopato: He didn't consult his publicist to craft each tweet or hold focus groups on how to engage with his followers.
--:-- Liz Lopato: He shot from the hip and said what was on his mind.
--:-- Liz Lopato: There was a kind of unguardedness there that I think people really related to.
--:-- Liz Lopato: And it creates a kind of closeness.
--:-- Liz Lopato: Musk very much became a star of the social media age by being available.
--:-- Patrick George: So in public, Musk was cultivating a fan base for himself, lapping up all the credit for this ambitious new car company.
--:-- Announcer: The man behind the whole project is there, Elon Musk.
--:-- Announcer: Elon, come on in here.
--:-- Announcer: How you doing?
--:-- Announcer: So clearly you have many aspirations and an overwhelming drive to innovate.
--:-- Announcer: You are establishing a presence, certainly with Tesla Motors, this electric car company.
--:-- Patrick George: He had proven to be just as persuasive in private.
--:-- Patrick George: Musk got some of those reluctant investors to loosen up, and he got enough cash to prevent bankruptcy.
--:-- Patrick George: The government also came through with a half-billion-dollar loan to float Tesla through the collapse.
--:-- Patrick George: And then the company raised even more money by going public in 2010.
--:-- Patrick George: Musk had managed to save the company.
--:-- Patrick George: And in 2012, Tesla released a new model.
--:-- Announcer: This is a historic automobile at a historic time.
--:-- Announcer: There was nothing else like the Model S on the market.
--:-- Announcer: Tesla definitely was making waves.
--:-- Christina Ra: And so more and more coverage on Tesla, more and more curiosity, much desire to get a peek under the hood.
--:-- Christina Ra: And in parallel, Elon was starting to use Twitter more and more.
--:-- Christina Ra: Musk's tweets became the thing to watch for all things Tesla.
--:-- Christina Ra: He'd make surprise announcements about new features or updates to the cars, sometimes in a reply to another user.
--:-- Christina Ra: It was chaotic, unpredictable and captivating.
--:-- Christina Ra: There was definitely something that happened in those early years that has continued, I think, on to today, where his accessibility created more interest in the products.
--:-- Patrick George: Plenty of cars have avid fan bases.
--:-- Patrick George: Ford Mustangs, Jeep Wranglers, even the humble Volkswagen Beetle.
--:-- Patrick George: But the people in the C-suite rarely get the same love their products get.
--:-- Patrick George: Musk was different.
--:-- Patrick George: He made Tesla feel like a movement, and he was the leader of that movement.
--:-- Patrick George: I think there was a phenomenon happening where people learned more about Tesla and SpaceX, but really this person behind them, whom they found fascinating and really attributed the products and the company's successes to.
--:-- Patrick George: And they became sort of Elon believers.
--:-- Patrick George: If Musk was the high priest prophesying the future, then Twitter was where he took people to church.
--:-- Patrick George: This guy's a real treat and it took me a while to get him to come here, but he's a really interesting entrepreneur very much a visionary many people think in space and in cars and in solar all kinds of things Elon Musk But everything worked towards cultivating a faith in him Elon Musk That same faith we heard about from Rachel Conrad.
--:-- Patrick George: And his believers were everywhere.
--:-- Patrick George: They were the kids online forming Elon Musk fan groups.
--:-- Patrick George: They were also deep-pocketed investors.
--:-- Patrick George: Tesla had never made a profit as a company.
--:-- Patrick George: But as Musk's believer count took off, so did Tesla's stock price.
--:-- Ross Gerber: If you look at Q1, Tesla grew about 1,700 and something percent.
--:-- Ross Gerber: And there's a lot of potential for this company to continue to grow and for the company itself to double and double and double again.
--:-- Ross Gerber: Elon has been a big part in the investment in Tesla in the past, current and future.
--:-- Ross Gerber: And what he's saying is that his decision to invest in Tesla in 2014 was also a decision to invest in Musk.
--:-- Ross Gerber: It paid off pretty quickly for us, and we were able to take profits off our original investment pretty rapidly.
--:-- Patrick George: Over the years, Musk's followers were used to seeing a particular mix of his personality.
--:-- Patrick George: 90% of him was really inspirational and aspirational, and 10% was kind of a jerk.
--:-- Patrick George: And when he went into jerk mode, you never knew what you were going to get.
--:-- Patrick George: His humor was a little juvenile for my taste, but I would say that about
