Not even that. Other people founded the company in 2003; he became Tesla's fourth CEO when they were about to launch the Roadster in 2008.
Musk was the first investor in Tesla, and chairman of the board from the beginning. While chairman, he was involved in the business. He took over as CEO in 2008 and has grown Tesla into the world's largest car company.
Trying to claim Tesla's success is not due to Musk is just wrong.
Nitpick: The most valued car company. Many larger companies in terms of employees and car output. Everything else sounds right though!
Regardless, of how you label it Elon created Tesla and there is no Tesla without elon.
Do we say the Warren Buffet owes everything to the founder of the New Bedford based Jewelry company Berkshire Hathaway? Hate Musk all you want but IDK why people try and discredit him with stuff like this
EDIT: Changed AP => AC
That's not what the actual founders say though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eblPwXFb7TE
They say he was not a founder within the first minute of the video.
I also think it's worth noting that he brought the best of current "good enough" manufacturing practices to luxury automobiles. I think this is the fairest examination of that, since it includes Elon himself: https://jalopnik.com/best-of-2021-in-epically-nerdy-intervie...
Our expectation around cars is that the build quality will be good from day one; this kind of incremental improvement approach is not common. IMHO it's also sub-par and somewhat dangerous for something as deadly as a car, but that's probably a side point for the current discussion.
We also see this with the Hyperloop. Big optimism, and the first actual implementation in Vegas kind of sucks. Maybe it'll improve over time, maybe not, but there's certainly an initial quality gap.
The question I'd ask is what does the equivalent look like for Twitter? I sort of think the "do it crappy, see how to improve it later" policy is more typical for social media.
I wouldn’t say best of ”good enough” .Tesla is actually one of the worst in terms of ”normal” car quality, even when compared to non-luxury cars. It has great battery, electric motors and even software, but normal items which you can see in normal car, are in the lowest side on quality. Also the way how you feel the car when driving is critized being B quality when compared for example German cars.
In many countries it has been listed on the best place on fault statistics (have most of then)
When you buy Tesla, you invest on EV research, not so much for luxury car while it might drive itself. You get a glance for the future.
Teslas, especially during the initial production runs for any given model, are built like Wayfair furniture. Good enough to do the job, but without a high level of quality. Turns out consumers will accept that.
Returning to the Twitter question: gosh, I hope Elon decides to invest heavily in areas I care about and doesn't ignore aspects which I think are vitally important.
See also: fast fashion.
Like electric cars and low cost access to space? Both of those fields are littered with the dead husks of failed attempts from prior decades.
Musk was hardly the first person to try any of this, he was the first person to be successful.
You do realize companies have been trying to make EVs even before there were fossil fuel powered ones, right?
There has never been a time in the last 150 years when some company wasn't making EVs.
The group in charge now caused more bleeding. Other social networks are doing great.
There is a lot of low hanging fruit.
For example, was Tesla a success because of some unique ingenuity by Musk? It seemed to me that his success was more the result of a commitment, both personally and financially, to building EVs that no one had previously had. Yes, that eventually led to success. But he didn't succeed were others tried and failed. He succeeded were the other auto manufacturers didn't even try because of their own bias towards the status quo. With Twitter he would need to succeed where every other social media platform has failed.