Google · SpaceX · Tesla · Elon Musk · Fortune Technology
Straubel formally joined the company in 2004 as its fifth employee and chief technology officer
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Inside Tesla’s early days.
Key facts
- Before Tesla became a $1.3 trillion juggernaut eyeing a potential megamerger with SpaceX, Elon Musk was writing a check to a then-27-year-old Stanford engineer who couldn’t get anyone to take
- In 2023, Redwood also secured a $2 billion conditional loan from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, the same initiative that helped put Tesla on the map
- It wouldn’t be until 2006 that Tesla unveiled its first‑generation Roadster prototype, an electric sports car able to travel 200 miles on a single charge and accelerate from zero to 60 mph in under 4
- After a 2009 legal settlement resolving a bitter feud over the company’s origins, Straubel was officially recognized as a cofounder alongside Musk, Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, and Ian Wright
Summary
Before Tesla became a $1.3 trillion juggernaut eyeing a potential megamerger with SpaceX, Elon Musk was writing a check to a then-27-year-old Stanford engineer who couldn’t get anyone to take his electric car idea seriously. JB Straubel had spent years building solar-powered vehicles in his spare time “as a hobby,” he told Fortune earlier this month on the sidelines of Brainstorm Tech in Aspen, Colo. But when he made his first pitch to the now-world’s richest person during a fateful lunch in 2003, it had absolutely nothing to do with cars. “I was seriously pitching the electric airplane idea to him, and he had absolutely no interest in it,” Straubel told Stanford students during a 2024 fireside chat. “I was kind of shameless in those days telling everybody I could talk to about this stuff, seeing if anyone would give me a few thousand dollars,” he recalled, adding that Musk “immediately wrote a check.”