Elon Musk (pictured) cracks us up. Remember when he went on a witch hunt to find the leak in his company, only to have his GC blow the whole covert op? Good times, good times.
The CEO of Tesla Motors has had a busy week.
He’s suing his former partner, getting bailout money, all in his own entertaining way, after the jump.
Musk is quite the character. The LA Times described him thusly
Musk, who bounces between ideas like Heidi and Spencer bounce between reality shows is a serial entrepreneur and with that, some ideas seem to work, such as Solar City, a company Musk is involved in that builds solar power systems for homes and corporations. And some are just so odd that we find them awesome, such as Musk’s space exploration company Space-X, which recently won a $1-billion contract from NASA to resupply the International Space Station after the space shuttle retires in 2010.
Musk provided early capital to Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning for the electric-car company in July 2003. By January 2008, Eberhard was out of the company and Musk was in charge. Opinions vary on what exactly happened and why, so we get to find out in a lawsuit!
Among other things (like not delivering Tesla Roadster VIN#2), the WSJ reports Eberhard
accuses Musk of trying to “appropriate control of Tesla…and Eberhard’s legacy as the company’s founder and visionary” from the moment he became involved in the company as a first-round investor in 2004.
He claims that Musk caused the delay of the launch of the Roadster, Tesla’s two-seater, luxury sports car, compromised the company’s finances and engineered his ousting in November 2007. The lawsuit also lists a number of occasions in which Musk is portrayed publicly in the media as the founder of the company and doesn’t try to rectify that, and another number of instances when Musk says that Eberhard was to blame for the Roadster’s delay and the company’s financial difficulties.
While he hasn’t gotten around to filing the threatened countersuit, Musk has taken it to the blogosphere.
With the recent lawsuit filed by Martin Eberhard, which seeks to perpetuate a version of Tesla’s history that is at odds with the truth, I felt it was important to set the record straight. This post is not a complete response to the allegations in the lawsuit (we will be responding fully in court soon), but rather an effort to correct several misconceptions propagated by Eberhard that are now being reported as truth. … At the heart of his attack, Eberhard plays to a common archetype – that of the noble inventor whose invention is usurped by the rich and powerful businessman. He has labored hard to create this impression and there is an intuitive appeal to it, as there is with any archetype, but in this case it is false. …
Still, it’s not all bad. Even though it’s being buried behind Ford in the headlines, Tesla is getting $465 million in aid from the federal government.
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