Musk hasn’t simply revolutionized the electric vehicle market—he’s created his own billion-dollar rivals.
A string of former employees at the carmaker have gone on to form electric vehicle and battery companies, mostly in California. (Dozens of others have landed at EV companies like busmaker, Proterra, and truck maker Rivian.) These ex-Tesla staffers are poised to have an outsize impact on the $6 trillion global auto industry in the decades to come.
Aurora Innovation
Sterling Anderson arrived at Tesla in 2013 to work on the Model X crossover and helped launch Tesla’s pursuit of self-driving technology by leading the development of its Autopilot driver-assist feature. “I liken it to serving in the trenches together,” he says of his time there. “You build a real bond in a high-pressure environment like that.”
The MIT-trained scientist left in 2016 to cofound self-driving startup Aurora Innovation, joined by former Google self-driving car chief Chris Urmson and Carnegie Mellon University AI researcher Drew Bagnell. Aurora has raised more than $1 billion and, in December 2020, acquired Uber’s autonomous unit, boosting the odds it’ll be a major player in autonomous vehicle technology. So far, it’s lined up tech partnerships with Uber, truck maker Paccar and Toyota. The Silicon Valley startup’s valuation jumped to an estimated $10 billion, following the Uber acquisition.
Aurora Innovation is yet to go public.
Sila Nanotechnologies
Gene Berdichevsky was Tesla’s seventh employee, hired in 2004 as principal battery engineer for the Roadster, the company’s first attempt at an electric car for the consumer market. By the time it came out, he was more interested in finding new ways to make the lithium-ion batteries he was working with a lot cheaper and more efficient. “After the Roadster launch, it was a decision to build my own company or stay and do the Model S project,” Berchidevsky says, who left in 2008 and started Sila Nano in 2011.
The battery outfit has since developed a silicon-based anode to replace costlier graphite. The material could make batteries used by Tesla and other EV makers at least 20% more efficient and eventually maybe improve performance by 50%, according to the company. It’s raised $930 million, including a $590 million round in January that boosted Sila Nano’s valuation to an estimated $3.3 billion and provided funds for its first large-scale plant that opens in 2024. “It’s been a long journey, but fundamentally I love to do this.”
Sila Nanotechnologies is yet to go public.
Fisker Inc
Henrik Fisker, a famed designer who once styled a BMW roadster for James Bond and led Aston Martin’s design studio, served as a design consultant for the Model S. Musk didn’t like his design and (unsuccessfully) sued him in 2008 for breach of contract, claiming the Danish entrepreneur took the contract to spy on Tesla (which Fisker denied). Fisker’s first attempt at a Tesla competitor, the plug-in hybrid Karma luxury car, failed due to a string of complications–battery fires, assembly flaws, even a shipment of cars lost in a 2012 hurricane. He shut down Fisker Automotive in 2014.
Now he’s back with a new company, publicly traded Fisker Inc., and getting ready to sell electric Ocean crossovers. The battery-powered SUV, priced from $37,500, will be built with auto-engineering giant Magna and compete directly with Tesla’s Model Y. Fisker, which went public in a 2020 SPAC deal, is a year away from starting production, but already has a market capitalization of $4 billion and about $1 billion of cash for product development. Raising the funds to launch an automotive startup was a key lesson from the early days. “The automotive industry is not really the type of industry that Silicon Valley either should or wants to invest in,” Fisker says, recalling money problems that arose at Fisker Automotive. “Tesla got out of it fairly quickly. . . . Elon had a lot of money (from PayPal) when he got into Tesla, so that helped. Then he was able to go public very early in 2010. . . . We weren’t.”
Lucid Motors
Peter Rawlinson, a veteran of Jaguar and Lotus, joined Tesla in 2009. He and Musk “got on like a house on fire”—at least at first. “We both obsess about reaching for the stars with technology, and the engineering just can’t be good enough,” Rawlinson says via Zoom. He was chief engineer for Tesla’s Model S, the 2012 electric sedan that redefined how good battery-powered cars can be.
He left that same year to help take care of his ailing mother and after some frustration with Musk over the Model X development program. Now he’s CEO of Lucid Motors, a Newark, California-based electric vehicle startup charged up with $1.3 billion of funds from Saudi Arabia. Deliveries of top-of-the-line luxury electric Air sedans, able to go more than 500 miles per charge and priced at $169,000, begin this spring. “I’m not competing with Tesla’s product; I’m competing with Mercedes-Benz,” says Rawlinson.
It is rumored that lucid motors will soon be going public through a merger with a SPAC called CCIV:
Redwood Materials
Like Musk, JB Straubel is a fellow Tesla cofounder and was its chief technology officer from the electric carmaker’s earliest days until 2019. His early dream was to make electric cars to cut carbon pollution.
Now he’s focused on battery recycling with his startup, Redwood Materials, to ensure that the lithium, cobalt and nickel in used batteries from Teslas and other electric vehicles stay out of landfills and dumps. The Carson City, Nevada-based company announced a $40 million funding round in September 2020, as it begins working on recycling projects with Panasonic and Amazon. “To fight climate change, we need to solve the impact products have on the environment,” he said at the time of the fundraising. Forbes estimates Straubel has a net worth of $1 billion—assuming he retains a chunk of his Tesla shares and based on stock received as board member for QuantumScape, a battery maker backed by Bill Gates.
Redwood is yet to go public.
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