Breaking the ICE: Decoding India's EV ecosystem

With roughly 13 percent, Elon Musk is the single-largest shareholder in electric vehicle (EV) pioneer Tesla. In mid-September, Musk was the richest man in the world by far by virtue of his holding in Tesla and rocket venture SpaceX.

Musk didn’t start up Tesla. He isn’t the man who envisioned an electric car based on lithium ion batteries—that was the brainwave of physicist JB Straubel in the ’90s. He isn’t the man who reckoned that an electric car technically was more suited to a lighter weight (lighter than an SUV) luxury sports car “that would let rich people have fun and feel good about themselves, too”, as Ashlee Vance describes it in his 2015 biography of Musk—that’s the way engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning saw it in the early 2000s. And Musk didn’t name the startup Tesla, in memory of electric motor pioneer Nikola Tesla. Eberhard and Tarpenning incorporated the company on July 1, 2003.  

 So what did Musk do? Plenty of the other important stuff. For starters, he believed in Straubel’s electric car project when, as Straubel told Vance, “everyone else had told me I was nuts”. Vance writes: “The crazy idea struck an immediate chord with Musk, who had been thinking about EVs for years.”  

Eberhard and Tarpenning pitched Musk as they felt he thought differently after hearing him speak at Stanford about his vision of launching mice into space. Musk gave $6.5 million of the $7 million needed to build a prototype vehicle, becoming the firm’s largest shareholder and chairman. Vance writes: “Musk had the engineering smarts to know what they were building. He also shared their larger goal of trying to end the US’s addiction to oil.”  

The Tesla-Musk tale is, among many things, also a saga of how an often-rare blend of engineering and marketing smarts, R&D and funding went a long way in building bestselling models like the Model Y.