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Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism (www.independent.co.uk)
submitted 2 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism::Tesla founder threatens to take action against media watchdog ‘the split second court opens on Monday’

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[–] 79 points 2 years ago (19 children)

Tesla founder

Ok look The Independent, I know that the company says he's a founder and Wikipedia lists him as a founder, but he's not. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded the company almost a full year before Musk had anything to do with it. He had to sue them to add his name to the list officially.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

    Wikipedia lists him as a founder

    Does it? I expected better of Wikipedia, so I checked, and both Musk's page and Tesla's avoid simply listing him as a founder by explaining the situation, i.e., that he was an early investor. Even the sidebar for Tesla, Inc. just links to a subsection rather than listing names.

    Just a note to add, addressing a related talking point that inevitably comes up:

    It's a very common piece of misinformation that he was determined to be a founder in a court of law. That never happened. It was part of an agreement to avoid a lawsuit. It's a lie that the relevant parties could all live with as part of a larger settlement.

    I like to ask Musk apologists, "Do you need to found a company to be that company's founder, yes or no?" If they waffle or say "no," there's no point continuing in good faith, because they're not serious people. It's not hard to say "Okay, that's a bit of a fib, he should be called an honorary founder, but blah blah blah..." But if they can't even do that, then they aren't operating based on reality.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Only here:

    A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five – Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk, and Straubel – to call themselves co-founders.

    Which I agree is sort of showing the trick and explaining how it's done all at once. But I wanted to give the headline writer a little bit of the benefit of the doubt that they actually looked it up somewhere other than on the Tesla website.

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  • [+] -15 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I will respond to this by asking "is registering the name of a company the only thing that counts when founding a company?"

    Because that's what the original founders did. They registered the name. No patents, no designs, no engineering, no staff. They registered the name, then went searching for VC money.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    That's a terrible argument. As if the idea and pitch aren't relevant in any way. For a preschool example of this, check out Shark Tank. You might have heard of it?

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    No, it's not a terrible argument. Anyone can have a pitch or idea. That does not mean it's automatically a viable product/service or a viable business.

    It's a valid question, how do we define "founder"? To play devil's advocate, I'm curious if the people who think Musk didn't co-found Tesla also agree Aaron Schwartz didn't co-found Reddit. He joined later, after reddit was already incorporated by Hoffman and Ohanian.

    In business, "founder" is already an honorary title. It has no inherent power. Co-founders often ensure they get C-suite positions as a company grows, have stock/shares, or other legal powers, but none of those are guaranteed just by being a "founder". So practically, there's no difference between calling Musk a "co-founder" versus "honorary co-founder." Let's just focus on calling him a piece of shit for the very definitive and obvious things we can point to.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    If the pitch is made and a VC opts in but doesn't negotiate a title, then they aren't privvy to the title of co-founder only after the concept is proven sound. Either you're a founder or you're not.

    *edit to add visual

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  • [+] -14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (10 children)

    Ok, it sounds like you're trying real hard to split hairs.

    Not just the company itself and Wikipedia say so, but legally, he is a founder. That was the outcome of the lawsuit.

    It's true that the first 2 founders legally registered the corporate entity known as "Tesla Motors". Then for the next year, they didn't do jack shit involving anything automotive... they were just going around looking for investors.

    Musk was basically their first, and biggest, investor. They didn't actually hire any engineers or, you know, actually start doing anything until Musk's money came into play.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    The rule of law in a specific geographic area in a specific period of time isn't nearly as important as the meaning conveyed which is misleading.

    Rather than missing the forest for the trees, why might he push for the title of founder? Why might some discredit his efforts and tactics in assuming the founder of title in specific contexts?

    He did not play a meaningful role in the beginning of the company and is not responsible for its success. Money was responsible, the two founders' expertise was responsible, that specific person is not special enough for their contribution to matter much. Anyone can supply capital especially during the inflated economic conditions (of which we are suffering the consequences of now) and during the time where EV and technology at large was developed enough to allow such developments to take place.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It sounds like nobody played much of a role at all until ol' moneybags showed up. Money talks, bullshit walks as they say

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago

    I think it's work that does the work, a tautology, I think using money as a proxy for work is a convenient hop and skip. When it comes down to a rigorous analysis (of the kind say a climate scientist does in a life-cycle assessment money is to vague a reason. What does it represent? Some amount of gold? Well, the US dollar is no longer pegged to gold à la Bretton Woods, how then does 'money talk'?

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  • [+] -7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

    He did not play a meaningful role in the beginning of the company and is not responsible for its success. Money was responsible

    You say that, but applies just as well to the first 2 founders.

    the two founders' expertise was responsible

    What expertise? Seriously, tell me what they actually brought to the table aside from pitching their idea for a company and attracting venture capitalist money. They registered the name of a company and had ideas. Not expertise. They hired the expertise, with Musk's money.

    Speaking of missing the forest for the trees, tell me this: Is an automotive company "founded" as soon as someone registers the name, or when they begin actual engineering efforts towards building an automobile?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago*

    Did musk hire expertise? Or do the actual engineering?

    It sounds like your actual argument is that neither he nor they founded the company.

    I guess it just sprang into existence on its own...

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Was elon choosing who was hired, and managing the initial company team?

    Cause if writing the title and coming up with the ideas doesnt count as founding, giving up some cash doesnt either. Thats just buying a company, not founding it.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago*

    Yes? That's basically what the initial 5 cofounders/investors did. Start hiring people and managing the company. They basically formed the board of directors.

    I know you're desperate to paint Musk in a bad light in any way possible, but how do you pretend that Musk just handed over cash and did nothing else while other people are calling him a micromanaging control freak?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I was meaning to respond but I think other's have. I have one of those 30+ min YouTube videos or similarly ridiculously long blog posts (and a longform article somewhere...) though I think you might not be interested so I'll keep it to myself unless you are interested in a good faith argument (argument, root word is the latin argumentum, to make clear; prove), I would rather not waste your time or my breath if that isn't the case.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    This is the entire argument Musk made in court, and honestly I don't think I care. Tarpenning and Eberhard are both engineers with actual inventions and software attributed to their direct design long before the idea of Tesla; Eberhard wrote the company's mission statement and guiding principles, and the two did the market research to discover that an electric vehicle could be a high-end consumer product. At its core, before the battery technology and stators were invented (neither of which Musk contributed to), that's what Tesla was.

    While it's true that Musk led development on the Roadster, I think we've seen very publicly over the past year what his "development leadership" looks like and I'm not entirely convinced it's a value-add. (Even before his disastrous year with Twitter, his checkered past leading Paypal—and being forced out for his poor leadership—would give a similar impression.) He didn't come up with the battery tech or the stators. He didn't contribute to a single patent in the early days of Tesla. In fact, that first design of the Roadster probably owed more to Lotus Motors than to Musk himself.

    It appears that he did with the Roadster, and the early years at Tesla, what he always does when leading product development: jump into an existing idea, make wild assertions and insistences, let the actual engineers figure out how to do it, and then justify a reason to exclude stuff when it turns out to be unfeasible. He did this demonstrably with SpaceX, Hyperloop, Boring Company, PayPal/Zip2, and now Twitter, and he's done it demonstrably at Tesla with the Cybertruck, so I don't know why it would be a surprise that he did it twenty years ago at Tesla too. He doesn't invent things or lead teams, he just makes noise and bluster.

    Which just leaves the money. And would you credit a really loud bank with "founding" a company?

    I wouldn't.

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