In July, 2003, Tesla Motors was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning (who both initially financed the company).
A year later Elon Musk invested in the company and became Chairman. Musk made Tesla’s long-term vision to produce affordable electric vehicles available for the public.
IIRC there was quite a fight between Martin and Elon for control of the company, it wasn't pretty
Which brings me to a point regarding this article: I don't want to be a dick but most startup postmortems don't tell the truth. Besides that most founders fail to realize exactly where they failed the fact is that the startup environment itself isn't transparent at all.
On that last point: a year ago I was talking to a friend who just closed his startup and he gave the typical "not enough traction/not enough funding" explanation they should be selling as hallmark cards already. Last month I bump into him after a meetup and the story was quite different: his startup was unfortunately used as filler along many others by a group of investors who needed to put a show because they were using government funds to finance these companies. All the participant startups got some seed money but at the end of the day all the full amount of funding was given to one single company with no employees a half-baked product that failed to launch and founded by none other than the younger brother of one of the investors who then moved his entire operation to singapore, and then nothing.
There are tons of stories like that, and founders can't say anything because when something like this happens and in the heat of the moment its most likely they would look like sore losers and the last thing they need at that point is to scare away other potential investors by looking like a rogue founder.
My point is that we rarely if ever get the whole story.
