Channel CNBC recently released the full version of the interview with the two founders of Tesla, Martin Eberhard (left) and Mark Tarpenningom (Marc Tarpenning), which until 2008 served as the company’s chief financial officer and vice president of electrical engineering. After the scandalous dismissal of Eberhard in 2007, his associate Tarpenning also did not want to remain in the company, after which he left it in 2008. In September 2009, by a court decision, Elon Musk received the right to call himself one of the five founders of Tesla, including Eberhard and Tarpenning. Before Musk, there were three other CEOs in the company.

If we return to the interviews with the two founders, we can mention interesting circumstances of their acquaintance with Elon Musk. According to them, long before the founding of SpaceX in 2002, Musk was interested in the topic of space exploration, and therefore, together with the two founders of Tesla, took part in meetings of the Mars Society, a community discussing the development of the planet of the same name. When he first met Musk, it was not possible to interest him in creating electric vehicles. Still, later a failure with investments in another direction led him to Tesla.

In an interview, Tesla’s founders admitted that one of the most difficult engineering challenges in creating the brand’s first electric vehicles was developing a battery and its production technology. From the connections to the cooling system, everything had to be developed from scratch, constantly experimenting. According to the founders of the company, some of the experiments ended in fires, but now Tesla’s developments of those years are used by all manufacturers of serial electric vehicles.

Assessing Elon Musk’s activities in the status of the current CEO of Tesla, Mark Tarpenning noted his desire to delve into all issues on his own, which can not only help but also hinder the work of the company. Musk is also risk-averse, both in engineering and finance. It is hard to deny that it was with the direct participation of Elon Musk that Tesla was able to become a mass manufacturer of electric vehicles, influencing industry trends, and he himself eventually became the richest man on the planet.