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He is listed as a founder and was the CEO before they took in any actual money and it's now the 9th largest company in the world.


1. I've never denied any of the accomplishments of tesla, so I don't know why you keep re-iterating them. Do you work for Tesla's marketing dept?

2. The first Roadster was shipped (to Musk, funny enough), 8 months before Elon became CEO. Let's be reasonable - I don't know how you can apply the founder/ceo label to a guy who was not ceo when their first product had already shipped.

There are plenty of stories (especially pre-Zuckerberg), or people starting companies, then being replaced by the board by a "real CEO" once they raised real money. These people are not founder/ceos. Google has a near identical path to Tesla; after Google's first real venture round, they hired Eric Schmidt as CEO, but Eric Schmidt is not the "founder" of Google.

I understand Elon has tied his public image to being the "founder" of Tesla; to the point that there was a lawsuit involved. However let's talk in plain terms here, he is not a founder of Tesla in binary terms.

Again, if it makes you feel better - you can read through my comments and note that I have never said anything qualitative about Tesla. I've said nothing about their growth, market cap, or Elon sleeping on production floors. I've simply said Elon was not a founder at Tesla, and therefore is not the group of people I think of as exceptional founder/ceos.

If you really wanted to steelman your argument, you'd be using SpaceX, which he did start, and was involved with before Tesla.


We can just agree to disagree. He was there from essentially what was the beginning of Tesla. Whether he qualifies as a founder CEO is up for debate




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