Tesla cofounder JB Straubel’s first pitch to Elon Musk failed. Then he turned his ‘hobby’ into a $1.3 trillion success
Before Tesla became a $1.3 trillion juggernaut eyeing a potential megamerger with Space X, Elon Musk was writing a check to a then-27-year-old Stanford engineer who couldn’t get anyone to take his electric car idea seriously. JB Straubel had spent years building solar-powered vehicles in his spare time “basically as a hobby,” he told Fortune earlier this month on the sidelines of Brainstorm Tech in Aspen, Colo. “That was sort of my pathway into becoming passionate about electric vehicles, and then also meeting Elon, ultimately.” But when he made his first pitch to the now-world’s richest person during a fateful lunch in 2003, it had absolutely nothing to do with cars. Straubel, a recently minted Stanford master’s graduate, sat across from satellite pioneer Harold Rosen and Musk, a “PayPal Mafia” member fresh off the company’s sale to eBay. He was hellbent on pitching the multimillionaire on an unmanned, hydrogen-powered airplane. “I was seriously pitching the electric airplane idea to him, and he had absolutely no interest in it,” Straubel told Stanford students during a 2024 fireside chat. Instead, Straubel pivoted to his other passion: building an electric sports car powered by the same lithium-ion cells found inside laptop computers. “I was kind of shameless in those days just telling everybody I could talk to about this stuff, seeing if anyone would give me a few thousand dollars,” he recalled, adding that Musk “immediately wrote a check.” Within weeks of that lunch, the two were sketching out plans for a high‑performance electric sports car, and Musk soon led Tesla’s first major funding round. Straubel formally joined the company in 2004 as its fifth employee and chief technology officer. In that role, he developed the battery pack used in Tesla’s first vehicle, the Roadster, bundling nearly 7,000 battery cells together that delivered 244 miles of range, further than other EVs at the time. Fortune/Katie Fehrenbacher Inside Tesla’s early days Straubel quickly bec