Tesla Motors was incorporated in July, 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who financed the company until the Series A round of funding. Elon Musk led the Series A round of investment in February, 2004, joining Tesla's Board of Directors as its Chairman.
Tesla Motors becomes one of the most promising companies in US, even in the world. Its founders become heroes of many people. The electric cars designed and manufactured by Tesla Motors brought the revolution to the automobile industry. Behind the glory, do you know its early history?
Elon Musk did not build Tesla from the ground up. He was a significant investor to the company a short while after creation. He used his money from the sale of PayPal (which, also contrary to common news reports, he did not build from the ground up) to take Tesla from an engineering project to a production car company. After he became an investor, a nasty battle between him and Eberhard (that started when each person blamed the other for drastically missing the budget) caused a lot of press and a lawsuit, resulting in Eberhard being kicked out of the company, and Elon being allowed to represent himself as a founder, since his money and involvement were critical to the company.
After gaining solid control of Tesla, Elon began to optimize the engineering processes to turn Tesla into what you see it today. The first Tesla, the Roadster, was more developed than engineered, and wisely so since the cost of designing, manufacturing, and fabricating a novel EV would have left the young company broke. The Roadster used a Lotus-built glider and a battery made by AC Propulsion, among other outsourced parts. Using off the shelf parts to build a production car was not an optimal long-run solution for Tesla as it yields lower profit margins, but it was well worth it as it got the car to market quickly, promoted the brand, and gave people a new idea of what an electric car could be. (More on the development of the Roadster). After the electric car was no longer viewed as a toy, the Tesla team knew that they could make a more practical car: the Model S. And here we are today.
