Before Tesla became a US$1.3 trillion giant and started considering a possible mega-merger with SpaceX, Elon Musk wrote a check to a then 27-year-old Stanford engineer who couldn’t convince anyone to take his electric car idea seriously.
JB Straubel contou to Fortuneduring Brainstorm Tech in Aspen, who spent years building solar-powered vehicles in his spare time, “basically as a hobby.” According to him, this was the path that led him to fall in love with electric vehicles — and, in the end, to meet Musk.
But when he made his first pitch to the now richest man in the world, at a decisive lunch in 2003, the subject had nothing to do with cars. Straubel, fresh from a master’s degree at Stanford, sat at a table with satellite pioneer Harold Rosen and Musk, then fresh from selling PayPal to eBay, intent on pitching the idea of a hydrogen-powered unmanned plane.
“I was really trying to sell him the idea of the electric plane, and he had no interest in it at all,” Straubel told Stanford students during a 2024 talk.
Then Straubel changed the subject and talked about his other passion: building an electric sports car powered by the same lithium-ion cells used in laptops.
“I was kind of shameless back then, I would go around telling anyone who would listen, to see if anyone would give me a few thousand dollars,” he recalled. Musk, he said, “immediately wrote a check.”
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A few weeks after that lunch, the two were already drawing up plans for a high-performance electric sports car, and Musk then led Tesla’s first relevant round of financing. Straubel formally joined the company in 2004 as its fifth employee and chief technology officer. In this role, he developed the battery pack used in Tesla’s first vehicle, the Roadster, bringing together almost 7,000 cells that delivered a range of 244 miles — more than other electric vehicles at the time.
Tesla’s early days
Straubel quickly became the architect of Tesla’s core technology, leading everything from battery manufacturing to the foundations of the Supercharger network and the planning of the first Gigafactory. Described in a profile of Bloomberg of 2019 as “Musk’s Woz”, in reference to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, Straubel appears in a large part of the company’s first patents. Following a 2009 court settlement that ended a bitter dispute over Tesla’s origins, he was officially recognized as a co-founder alongside Musk, Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning and Ian Wright.
Straubel described Tesla’s early years as “incredibly fun, but also stressful.” In fact, the automaker’s history was marked by internal power struggles, risk of bankruptcy and technical difficulties, as a small group tried to build a sports car from thousands of laptop batteries. A now iconic photo shows Straubel in his backyard, manually gluing lithium-ion batteries to a structure that would give rise to Tesla’s first prototype.
“Those are some of the most special memories I have, because it was a very close-knit group trying to do something that was very difficult, but also something that we would all basically do for free, and that we felt was important to the world and necessary,” he said, adding that the group felt Tesla had “as much of a chance of failing as it did of succeeding.”
Musk tends to be more direct when recounting the company’s origins. At a shareholder meeting in 2016, he said he gave Tesla only a 10% chance of success in its early years and admitted that the team “had no idea what they were doing.” He made similar comments about SpaceX, which suffered three rocket failures in a row and came close to bankruptcy in 2008 before later holding the biggest IPO in history. Speaking to employees before ringing the opening bell on its first day of trading this month, Musk said he gave SpaceX the same low chance of survival when he founded it in 2002.
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“I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding,” he said of the company that would help propel him into becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
It wasn’t until 2006 that Tesla introduced the first-generation Roadster prototype, an electric sports car capable of traveling 200 miles on a single charge and accelerating from zero to 60 miles per hour in less than four seconds. Series production began in 2008, and the first model year sold out quickly.
“[Elon] it was already inspiring at that time,” Straubel told Fortune. “I loved working with the group of engineers we brought together. We were all very aligned and united around a very similar mission.”
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From Tesla to the battery chain
After 15 years as Tesla’s main technology name, Straubel left the company to focus on Redwood Materials, a battery recycling startup that he founded while working at the automaker. In an earnings call in which he announced his departure, Musk said:
“If we hadn’t had lunch in 2003, Tesla basically wouldn’t exist.”
One Wall Street analyst, Alexander Potter of Piper Jaffray, even credited Straubel as “probably the second most important person” at the company.
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Straubel’s startup has raised more than $2.3 billion in venture capital from companies and strategic investors, including Google, Microsoft and Nvidia’s NVentures arm. In 2023, Redwood also secured a $2 billion conditional loan from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program — the same initiative that helped put Tesla on the map. Today, Redwood is worth around US$6 billion, according to TechCrunchand its partners are Volkswagen, Volvo, Toyota and BMW.
Straubel, however, did not leave his old company for long. In 2023, he joined Tesla’s board of directors.
Now he’s trying to solve the supply chain problem that could define the next phase of electric vehicles and AI infrastructure. On stage at the Brainstorm Tech conference, FortuneStraubel warned that the US power grid is already under pressure from the explosion of new data centers built to fuel the artificial intelligence boom.
“The pace of growth and demand for energy is unprecedented,” he told journalist Allie Garfinkle, from Fortune.
Tesla co-founder’s advice
Two decades after taking a chance on a small startup, Straubel boils down his advice to future entrepreneurs and engineers to a willingness to tackle tough problems, even when the odds don’t seem favorable.
“You have to be willing to dive into something, even if you have a good idea that it might fail,” he told Fortune. “Still, it’s worth it.”
This often means ignoring skeptics.
“As an entrepreneur, you will hear from 10 or 20 people that everything you are doing is a bad idea, that it won’t work and that you should try something else,” he said. “There were many times when they said that a certain investment was bad, that Tesla was a bad idea, among other things.”
Among some of Tesla’s early supporters were Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who reportedly considered buying the automaker in 2013 when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Musk took the two for a test drive in an early Roadster, but because of a bug in the system, the car wouldn’t go faster than 10 miles per hour.
“I was like, ‘Look, I swear to you it goes a lot faster than that,’” Musk said at a shareholder meeting in 2016. “Still, they were kind enough to put some money into the company despite the worst showing in the world.”
Despite initial stumbles, Straubel said he learned to follow his passion and advises others to believe in what they are building.
“Pursue something that really matters to you as a founder, entrepreneur or engineer,” he said. “Try not to get caught up in what other investors say is the right thing to do or what seems to be trending at the moment.”
This, according to him, often requires ignoring counterpoints.
“I had mentors early on who really encouraged me to think bigger and focus on what I really loved,” he said. “When you’re challenged and you want to try something smaller, you want to be a little safer, it’s hard to think big. But looking back on something that went really well, I always wish I had dreamed bigger, tried harder, scaled faster.”
To be successful, concluded Straubel: “You really need to have personal conviction that what you’re doing is worth it deep down.”
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