[imagesource: CNBC]

In July 2006, Tesla unveiled its battery-powered roadster, with then CEO Martin Eberhard talking a good game.

The vehicle would set you back $100 000, and the reaction from many of the reporters present was that it was a project doomed from the start.

With the benefit of hindsight, that was clearly not the case. Tesla recently became the first automaker company to hit a valuation of $1 trillion, and Elon Musk is way, way out in front in the battle of the world’s richest humans.

Despite his odd Twitter antics, we might add.

Eberhard, on the other hand, isn’t a name you hear very often, and neither is another early executive, Marc Tarpenning.

That’s the pair of them up top, and they’re actually Tesla’s original shareholders but haven’t profited off the company’s stratospheric rise due to watering down their shares over the years.

Forbes reports:

It was Musk’s seed capital—the result of an early payday investing in payments processor PayPal—that turned Eberhard and Tarpenning’s vision into a reality. Ultimately, it also set Musk on a path to take full control of Tesla by steadily raising his ownership stake in a series of nine funding rounds prior to the company’s 2010 IPO, each of which further diluted the stakes of Eberhard and Tarpenning…

Had Eberhard been wealthier from the sale of the Rocket eBook, an early handheld electronic reader he and Tarpenning created in the late 1990s, there would have been no need to seek initial funding from Musk, he says.

61-year-old Eberhard says he does retain a “relatively small” stake in the carmaker without being specific.

He actually sued Musk in 2009 over his ouster from Tesla, as well as slander, with the case later settled for undisclosed terms.

Those terms included agreeing to having Musk, former Tesla Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel, and engineer Ian Wright labelled as co-founders.

From two co-founders to five, just like that.

Citing a “non-disparagement” clause that was part of the 2009 settlement, Eberhard declines to elaborate on his views about Musk these days.

By contrast, Musk himself has shown far less restraint. He described Eberhard as “literally the worst person I’ve ever worked with” in a January 2020 interview.

Wright has said on the record that he owns no Tesla stock, adding “I could not imagine a $1 trillion valuation!”

Tarpenning now works at Spero Ventures, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, and says he still owns a small amount of Tesla shares.

Essentially, of the five co-founders, it’s only Musk and Straubel, who left Tesla in 2019, who have likely obtained billionaire status through Tesla’s rise and rise.

Straubel’s stake is estimated to be worth around $1,3 billion, on the assumption that he retained a significant portion of the Tesla stock he owned at the time he left.

At least Eberhard does retain a greater perspective on the whole saga:

“The valuation is what it is. What I’m happy about is the success of the company. It’s crucial that we get off of fossil fuels and Tesla has been the major driver of that, which is what we had hoped for from the beginning,” Eberhard says.

“Whatever my opinion is about Musk, I am still super happy to see the electric car revolution—that we after all started—I’d like to see that revolution winning. It has to.”

There’s no love lost between Eberhard and Musk, but he’s still rooting for the EV revolution.

Fair play.

[source:forbes]